What's under there ?

Yellow wagtail spruce up. Spent a very pleasant couple of hours with these birds last week. Boy are they fast !
Incidentally- the green weed is causing a serious problem on the mosses and meres in Shropshire. It is Crassula Helmsii, a kind of short fleshy succulent which has been introduced and literally takes over. It covers any bare wader type mud almost overnight. The area where the wagtails were photogrhed was shallow water and mud last year.

D200 Sigma 50-500mm.
Cheers
350th @f8
ISO 400
JohnR
PS Forgot to mention- this is a large crop,(about 50% of thre frame) as recently I,ve been going for a smaller subject image as it gives so much more DOF even if it sacrifices abit of detail

Great pose of a bird I don't see round here.
I must take you to task on your use of a capital H
in helmsii. The accepted convention is that when writing Latin names the specific part is always lower case. and that the whole name is always italicized in print if possible. See

http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWlatin.html

for common names this is an interesting point of view.

http://themarvelousinnature.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/a-capital-offence/

Thanks David I knew that ( I,ve moaned about having to do it so much in the past ! ) but couldn't work out how to do italics on this site, and put a capital H because I assumed it was some ones name. !!
Cheers
john
PS lets call it New Zealand Pygmy Weed - its a lot easier !!

Hi John,

Interesting pose. Looks a tad dark on my monitor, also not to sure about the perch.

I'm sure you have a vast perch collection to choose another !!

Regards

Rob

Nice pose John, but there isn't really enough colour seperation from the bg for me (given that it is such a colourful bird). maybe a brightness adjustment on the bird would help?

Nice pose and beautifully captured .Its a good image for such a big crop. Nice one.

Thanks
Yes - difficult separating a yellow green bird from a yellow green backgound.
JohnR

Like the action captured here, you have done really well as these move so quick as you have mentioned,colours+BG are nice too

Lovely shot John, the pose makes it stand out from the crowd.
Eric

A beautiful bird, and what a pose, I like this one lots!

Hi John.
Think maybe the bird skould be a little more yellow very nice shot.
Cheers Mitch.