Wildlife at Leersumse Veld
It had only been a few weeks since our last visit to the Leersumse Veld, and we’d returned because we knew there was more landscape photography to do, in particular working with the water there. We’d only explored a part of the ponds (lakes?) and we knew you could hike all the way around them.
But to our surprise, the birds had arrived. En mass. Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised us, but it did because we hadn’t bothered to read some of the signs posted at the trail gates as you entered the area immediately adjacent to the ponds. They said certain trails were closed from March 15th to September 15th to protect nesting birds.
So our various hikes found us listening to a lot of Graylag Geese and, whenever we got near the shoreline, there was always an Eurasian Coot or two squeaking at us from somewhere in the weeds.
Unfortunately, none of the birds seemed to like people (though at one point, while I had been standing still waiting for the clouds to break a bit, a couple of Graylag Geese swam past about 30 yards away from me, turning to make their way into the middle of the pond once they noticed me), so we were usually stuck with watching them floating around in the middle of the pond or on the far bank.
And I had my trusty 55-200 mm zoom with me, so at one point I tried my hand at a bit of wildlife photography (poorly I might add). But with quite a bit of cropping managed an image that shows a bit of animal life. Thank goodness for the massive megapixel bump-up with the X-T5 sensor.
We had a mix of cloudy and partly cloudy days on our short trip and fortunately no real rain, so we had an enjoyable time on our multiple trips out.
Perhaps the only thing better than being out doing landscape photography is doing landscape photography with a bit of wildlife around.
It was a good weekend.