Operation: Gorse Bush
When filming my photo walk the other week, I found I was quite drawn to the beautiful flowering gorse bushes. While there were no birds on the gorse on that occasion, it formed an idea in my mind of an image that I wanted to create, of a bird on the flowering gorse, and this was how Operation: Gorse Bush was formed.
I set out nice and early on Bank Holiday Monday, we’d had a windy Easter weekend, with Storm Dave hitting north of us, but still bringing in all the winds, however, today the winds had all past, and it was set to be a beautiful, still and sunny morning. I was up early, wanting to get out and to my spot as early as possible, eventually getting up to the top of the hill just after 8am.
I am using my new Sony A7 V, which I picked up at the photography show a few weeks back, and I am loving the upgrade. I’ll do a proper review in a few months’ time, once I have had more time to put it through its paces. And I am pairing this with the 200-600 lens.
The gorse I am looking at, has some flowering hawthorn further down the hill, bring some lovely bokeh into the background of my image (if the birds play ball).
After getting set up it was onto waiting for an obliging subject, which for the first time in history, took only 10 minutes to arrive in the form of a Chiffchaff, going after some insects on the gorse! I saw it fly onto the back of one of the gorse bushes and readied myself in the hopes it would hop around to the font, which it did and posed PERFECTLY! It was only their for the briefest of seconds, before hopping on some more, and with my 30fps of the A7v, I was able to get quite a few images from this very brief encounter.
As the Chiffchaff moved around the gorse, a Blue Tit swooped in, scaring it off, but landing on the gorse long enough for a photo!
It is fair to say I was well chuffed with these images, and that they happened so early on in my day was brilliant, so I went to waiting to see what else would arrive and if we could build on these solid images.
I waited, and waited, and waited some more, eventually a pigeon landed far off, so I took the opportunity to photograph it, as something to do more than anything.
The birds were there, I could hear them and see them off in the field and in the trees, but they were not going onto the gorse. I am not sure why, I was tucked away and not moving so I don’t feel I was putting them off, but I was starting to get the feeling that it was just pure luck that I was able to get my images first thing.
I waited some more, and eventually after 2 hours of nothing, I decided to call it a day and head home. I did a bit of a walk around the area of gorse in the field I was in, to see if it was me putting the birds off, but I didn’t see anything on them the whole way around, or when I headed down into the woods on the way back home. They were definitely there, but in the gorse and surrounding trees, rather than on it and posing for me.
Down in the woods, we did get a juicy bonus bird in the form of a Treecreeper! I have been trying to get an image of one of these for a while now, and although I don’t think it is the best image ever and probably won’t make my 2026 photo book (2025 is currently in the post!) it was still great to see and photograph.
I did find one slight issue with the 30fps of the A7v, if the subject isn’t looking at you, you can end up taking A LOT of headless images…. Of the 169 images I ended up with of the Treecreeper, 100 were headless, and I edited 5 😂
I tried to find some more birds on the gorse at the bottom of the woods, but alas, there were none here either. I did see a female Black Bird, rummaging through the leaf litter and got some nice images of her, and also had an exciting, but very brief sighting of a Gold Crest! (which I was not able to photograph).
All in all, it was an excellent morning of photography, while it would have been nice to have a few more subjects land on the gorse, I am really happy with my Chiffchaff and consider Operation: Gorse Bush a success!