TomKal foto

I have a big soft spot for this bird. Often during your photo “hunts” this bird is the only one on which you can count, and you can always find it in forests and parks. It widely occurs all year round, so you can watch it and photograph it almost everywhere and nearly always. Due to its nice, colorful plumage, in proper lighting conditions you can take satisfactory pictures, to which you will gladly go back. In size it is smaller than the sparrow (with a weight of about 20g/ the sparrow: ~30g), with a wingspan of less than 30 centimeters. The nuthatch is known for its habit to „fix itself” to the tree bark so that it hangs with its head down. Although it quite widely occurs, photographing it is not very easy. It is very swift, dynamic and doesn’t sit still for long. Winter can sometimes make things a little easier, as the bird is a habitue of birdhouses placed at the edge of a forest and in parks.
Last minute news 08/2013
As I wrote before, in a forest you can always count on the Eurasian Nuthatch. And so it was this time during my beaver trap. Several beautifully colored Nuthatches, relaxed after raising young, allowed me to photograph them, and what is more important, to record their voices.
Last minute news – 02/2015
Sometimes, you can find little information about the species itself or background of creating pictures of animals presented in the gallery on my site, simply because nothing interesting happened or I could not find any curiosities of the animal photographed. This time, however, I had to describe the circumstances in which I took the new images for existing galleries of yellowhammers, long-tailed tits and nuthatches. In the vicinity of the Slovak border, in a small village on the Polish side, at the turn of rural road there was a place where I could safely stop my car. Just out the window of the car I could observe treetops which were at about eye-level in front of me at a distance of several meters, there was a steep slope, and rural buildings below. I could watch there yellowhammers, long-tailed tits, nuthatches and a great spotted woodpecker slightly further to the left. I took several interesting photos of all three of them, but the great spotted woodpecker, and they enriched the existing galleries. I could not presume, however, that my observations would arouse concern among villagers. Although I noticed an old man who watched me with a pair of binoculars, but it did not come to my mind that my presence there could be so disturbing that somebody could report this to the police. For me it was the first time when I was stopped by the police while shooting, and where it was - in the middle of the village, on the road in broad daylight. Two police officers arrived, they were really alarmed by my 600-lens covered with the masking material. "Slowly put it off" said the policeman. But after a while, after my explanation what I was doing there, their fears and emotions came down. A resident of a nearby house was reassured by cops’ intervention and everything went back to normal state. But now after the police action and a visit of a noisy quad driver intrigued by my presence I could only shoot canopies. This is how ended the second attempt to take photos from this place. The vast majority of images were taken during the first day of shooting there. This description relates commonly to news from 02-2015, to yellowhammers, long-tailed tits and the Eurasian nuthatch.
Last minute news 02/2018
Finally, after several years, the gallery of the Eurasian nuthatch has been remodeled. This time I spent many hours in the freezing cold trying to take better, more interesting and more dynamic photos of the Eurasian nuthatch. Initially, in the early morning, the temperature dropped 10 degrees below zero. Even birds at the feeder were spiritless in the morning. While eating, the nuthatch was the fastest and the most self-confident among the other birds. It gave ground only to the great spotted woodpecker and the middle spotted woodpecker. It chased away all other species (great tits, Eurasian blue tits, greenfinches) immediately. It appeared so quickly that photographing hummingbirds when compared with this was an easy thing to do. Those froze motionless in the air at least from time to time, and with a little luck and good reflexes you could take some photos of them. The nuthatch, like the kingfisher, was unpredictable. It was not possible to foresee when and where it would appear.  It dropped down like a bolt from the blue, took as much food as it could in order to store it in crevices among the tree crowns. Many hours of attempts, and such a poor result. While making those attempts, I took many dynamic pictures of  other species, including greenfinches and great tits, and their galleries have been remodeled. After such efforts and sacrifices and hundreds of attempts I managed to take several interesting, though rather poor quality photos. They must be included in the gallery, and the gallery gets into the news section.
Lasty minute news-11/2019
The autumn meetings at the birds-feeder hut also resulted in adding a few photos of the Nuthatch to it gallery.
Lasty minute news-06/2023