My last day in Scotland - Winter Wildlife Tour Day 3
It is the final day of my Wildlife Photography Tour with Karen Miller, and today we are off to see the Red Deer, but first, we have round two with the Crested Tits, in the hope that today, we can get some good encounters.
We headed up to Karen’s crested tit site, crossing everything that today would work out, as it was my last chance to see these little critters this trip. Thankfully the weather was a bit kinder today, with the winds having dropped considerably since Tuesday.
We got set up and then is suitable wildlife photography tradition, we waited, and waited some more. We did get a visit from a coal tit which was nice, but it took a while before our first encounter with the crested tit.
As I said in my previous post, this is quite a new site for Karen, having lost her cresties at her other site last year. It takes a while to train the birds up, to get used to the feeders moving around, and this creastie was a bit slow on the uptake, even though the feeder had only moved by about a foot.
Eventually we had out first fleeting visit, with the crestie, hopping about a lot, these are some fast moving birds, and it was a bit of a struggle to keep up with it with my 200-600mm lens at 600 mm. I did manage to get an image of it down on the bottom branches as I did on our first day.
The crestie, moved on quite swiftly, and we were back to waiting. After a while, Karen left to go and check another of her feeders in this area, to see if that one was getting any visits. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, and so she brought the feeder back and popped it up in another branch, in the hopes that the crestie we had visiting would prefer that location.
About an hour after we first saw our crested tit, it was back on the original feeder, I once again got some images of it on the lower branches before it flew off and onto the feeder behind us, result! This feeder was in a much more photographic location and I quickly managed to get some more images of it over on this side as it was darted between the branch, tree and feeder.
I am particularly happy with this one of it in the tree.
All this action was over in about 10 minutes as the crestie moved on once more. We were then back to waiting, I managed to get some, rather excellent if I do say so, images of a blue tit, but unfortunately, the crestie didn’t come back before we had to move on to make our appointment with the red deer.
It was a bit of a drive over to the estate where we would be seeing the deer, we stopped off for a quick car park lunch at Tesco, and arrived to meet gamekeeper Graeme who would be taking us to see the deer. It was a short drive up in Graeme’s truck to where the deer would be. The estate we were on, feed the deer once a day over winter when their natural food is scarce, so they are somewhat used to people. It was a beautiful drive up to the deer, especially when we were out looking over the mountains.
The deer get fed in a woodland and once parked up, it was out the truck and onto photographing. As Karen has been here many, many times before, it was just me photographing. The deer were quite high up in the woodland, in amongst the trees and a small clearing. To photograph them, I had to stay on the track, though I could walk up and down a little way, to get some different compositions.
I found this quite hard, there were a lot of deer here, and they were all quite stacked up, making it hard to get a clean composition of one without a load of others in the background. There was also some rather annoying (for me) dead branches in this clearing, which I found quite distracting in my images. It took me quite a while to get into the swing of taking photos, for some reason, as it was just me photographing, I felt like I was being watched and I got quite uncomfortable. This was all in my head and probably something that I should look at resolving at some point, but at the time, I found that talking to my camera really helped me to relax and get into the swing of it.
I made sure to remember to take both vertical and horizontal orientated images, for a bit of variety.
The deer were very high up the hill so Graeme, walked up and down the track to try and encourage them down a bit. This worked really well, and I was able to get some stronger images.
I also got to see my first Sika deer, he only had one and half antlers and was named Brian.
One of the younger stags came down onto the track ahead of me, so I got down really low with my camera, and waited for it to walk a little bit closer so that it’s head was in a bit of a clearing between the trees, helping to separate it out from the background.
After I got my images, it was now time to feed. Graeme put the food out for them up the track, and they all came down to gobble it up.
In all this was a great last day in Scotland, and I can definitely say I will be back again for some more winter wildlife photography.
If you are looking to have your own experience with Karen, then her winter tours for 2027 are open for bookings, and you can find out more and book your spot here!