David Element
Wildlife Photography and Digital Video Images
____________________________________________________________________________________________________Birds 117 – European Robins
EUROPEAN ROBIN Erithacus rubecula
EUROPEAN ROBIN Erithacus rubecula
EUROPEAN ROBIN Erithacus rubecula
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Every once in a while, an individual European Robin Erithacus
rubecula may become extremely confiding and
in this case no bait was required other than the disturbance of a pile of
wood-chippings in order to obtain his loyalty. The photographer simply needed
to put in an appearance in this male Robin’s territory (in a local park) in
order to be able to obtain ridiculously close photographs and film of this
extremely obliging little bird from a range of as close as 3 inches (5cm) from
the lenses. This relationship continued from the beginning of February 2016
until mid-September 2017 with a hiatus of just over 4 months between August
2016 and late December of the same year and it is seen by the photographer as
having been a-once-in-a-lifetime situation.
Robins usually have short and highly active lives and it is presumed
that he was either usurped from his territory or that he had died or been
killed (relatively few wild animals will ever live to their full natural
life-expectancy). When he returned, he let the photographer know about his
presence by unexpectedly landing on firstly his hat and then his shoulder, so
he was able to identify him after all this time. These close-ups were taken
using natural light with a 105mm macro lens with a Nikon D7200 camera body with
an internal 1.3x in-built digital magnifier and none of the photographs have
been cropped. The Robin readily fed on
broken pine nuts from the photographer’s hand as indeed did one of his chicks,
but his mate was never tempted, and she kept her distance. If he spotted
invertebrate food, he would always collect it first, often returning to the
photographer’s hand to cram in a nut-fragment so that he could return to his
nest with as much food as possible. One
film sequence ended abruptly when the bird hopped up into the one place where
it could not be filmed – on the video camera’s preview screen, where it sat for
about 30 seconds!
·
Several of David’s short films of European Robin behaviour may be
found on his DavidPElement YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFfP_L5WKGGl4iVcf-srBdg?view_as=public.
·
David has published high quality photographic books entitled ‘European Robins’ and ‘European Robins 2’ in
which some of the above and many other photographs of this species have been
included. See: https://www.bobbooks.co.uk/bookshop/photobook/european-robins and: https://www.bobbooks.co.uk/bookshop/photobook/european-robins-2 for details.
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