Are you a birder, a photographer or a common or garden polymath?
Let me help you before you answer. I’m sure I’m a birder. For as long as I can remember, I have owned a pair of bins, a notepad and had a general sense of where I was going, and I was as happy as Larry. (Never met this Larry but I hear he is a rather nice chap) Over time, I noticed a major change happening in the hides of this fine land. Large optics were being ‘adapted’ and some folk had even abandoned these tools of true birding for cameras with large…appendages screwed onto the fronts of them. There was barely room in a hide for the owners of these huge camera combinations let alone a serious birder trying desperately to hear a bird song above the sound of shutters firing at 8fps. And some of the images people were getting were amazing. Shots of Snipe being carried away by a Sparrowhawk and a Herring Gull consuming a Little Auk are a couple that have stuck in my mind. And I remember when I was a boy and got my first camera, the first thing I tried to shoot was a group ...