Scotland 2017

Mountain Hare - Cairngorms, Scotland

Scotland seems to be becoming a regular venue for our wildlife trips and our latest visit had been planned for some time. If you want to secure the services of one of the many togs now offering guiding services, booking twelve months in advance is very much the norm. The flipside of this is we wanted to photograph Red Squirrels and Mountain Hares in the snow; try booking those conditions that far ahead.

Our ultimate destination was the Cairngorms, but we decided to break the journey in two and started off with a day in a hide just over the border. Frankly that was a disappointment. The weather wasn't the best and the fact we needed to use ISO 3200 to get any sort of usable shutter speed was never going to make it easy. Biggest let down of all was the particular species we were after didn't show up all day, always a possibility in this game. We just have to accept the fact and move on.

Move on is what we did the following day and managed to get to the RSPB visitor centre at Loch Garten with about 30 minutes of useable light left. There was no-one about, but plenty of birds and our first sighting of Crested Tits. A number of the birds there were quite tame, we even had a Blue Tit fly inside the car.

Our base for the next three days was Grantown-on-Spey from where we were hoping to get the pictures we wanted. Naturally enough, there was no snow so we had to make the best of it.

Day one saw us start with Red Squirrels and at one time we had six of them in range to choose from. After a morning with them we moved on to get Crested Tits. This was more of a challenge, the birds were backlit and there was a considerable amount of flare that was hard to control. It does seem a bit churlish to complain about getting sunshine in Scotland, but that's how it was.

Day two and still no snow, but we went off to the Findhorn Valley to do Mountain Hares and they were easy to spot. We had a very productive, if cold, day as there was a strong, icy wind blowing down the glen. We ended the day happy.

Day three dawned with a sprinkling of snow and we were hopeful that we could get what we'd driven six hundred miles to get. It turned out that there was nowhere near enough snow, although showers were forecast for the day, so we had another session in the Crested Tit hide. It was planned to be a morning only visit and then move on elsewhere, possibly for Buzzards, but we elected to stay with the Cresties all day. The showers did materialise, but it wasn't until we drove back to Grantown that we realised how much there had been. More significant falls were forecast for that night, so the decision to stay an extra day was taken. Fortunately both our accommodation and our guide were able to cope with that and a plan was set.

There was about four inches of the white stuff on the ground when we got up on the fourth day and we knew the gods were smiling on us at last. We spent a couple of hours with the Red Squirrels and then headed off up the glen for a second time. Finding Hares this time was naturally totally different, but our guide is a regular there and has a good idea of where certain individuals like to hunker down. A successful afternoon resulted and it was job done. We had already bagged some beautiful images of both the Squirrels and the Hares, but getting them in the snow just took them to another level.

Had we not stayed for the extra day, we wouldn't have been able to get home anyway, so it was a good decision to stay. There was more snow that night, but by delaying our departure until mid-morning next day we were able to get down to Perth with little trouble. In fact, we actually made it all the way back to Dorset. A successful week completed.

Photography Hides

Red Squirrel - Cairngorms, Scotland

We all know it is nigh-on impossible to get close to any wildlife and shoot a picture good enough to satisfy the pixel-peepers of this world. The solution of course is to use a hide.

With the explosion in wildlife photography that digital imaging has generated, photography hides have become big business. Up and down the country there are a number of opportunities to use a hide to capture many species and the standard of these hides varies wildly.

Though my preference is to capture images through personal fieldcraft, I have sampled many in the past few years, both in the UK and abroad. Indeed I have used three in the past week alone. These vary from a hole dug in the ground and covered in camo netting to a Rolls Royce standard shed complete with tea and coffee making facilities and a loo.

What you get for your money varies wildly too. In fact in one case I have declined to visit a hide purely on the grounds of cost set against likely results. On the one hand you have a set up where you are escorted to the hide at the start of the session and are then left to your own devices for the rest of the day. You decide when you want to leave and do so. The better hides and, in my experience, where the better results can be obtained are those where you have a guide in attendance for the duration of your stay. I've also visited hides where you are taken to the structure and then the guide returns every couple of hours to rearrange perches and replenish bait. The downside of this is there is a lull after the guides visit until the wildlife builds confidence to return.

Of course the fickle nature of wildlife still means you are not guaranteed success. One of the hides I used last week was to capture a particular species and not one showed up. Last year I made a 400 mile round trip and an overnight stay to photograph Ospreys fishing and had one pass. Inevitably conditions were not conducive to either tempt the birds to fish, or to get a usable image from the one visit the bird made. It's an expensive game and you pay your money and take your chance.

But there is one aspect of hides that I find hard to understand. The RSPB have a large number dotted across the country, but my travels to them around the UK virtually always leave me disappointed. A large proportion of them are just too far from the action and useless to photographers. They're fine for the birders with their scopes, who have no interest in a pictorial record of their sighting. Would it be right to believe the RSPB just don't want to appeal to the wildlife photography community? I believe they're missing a trick and with it a further income stream.

I'll continue to use hides, although I'm not bothered about pixel-peepers. But my preference will always be for images captured using fieldcraft. So many times have I seen images where I can recognise the perch and know which hide it was taken from. Of course others can do the same to my images taken from a hide.

As a final comment, the image above was captured in a hide in Scotland last week. But in my archives I have many Red Squirrel images better than this and just as close, that were shot laying in undergrowth on Brownsea Island.