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Merlin Expand text

As usual one has to have a little bit of luck in nature photography. With the merlin it was exactly this way. A merlin sat down for a few seconds, which was enough to take several pictures. And that’s how our encounters with this bird during our two-week stay in Mongolia ended. And, as you can see, the bird was really close…
Last minute news -06/2018 Iceland
This was my second contact with the merlin, but how different. It is very obvious that I would love to complement the current, practically one-photo gallery of the bird with new photos showing the beauty of this species, but also the environment in which it lives. Such gallery looks interesting, full and makes me willing to look at these images again and again. Staying in Iceland was a good time to find a place (well, Johann - you found it!) where finally more pictures of this falcon could be taken. And we did it in a sense by accident. Despite the fact that we were looking for a merlin in several places that it was said to occur, it could not be observed there. This time just from the public road we were searching for a harlequin duck, when suddenly on a soaring rock, on the top of it, Johann noticed four gray chicks of a merlin lying in a nest in the grass. Unfortunately, it was almost midnight and we had to get some sleep but we returned in the morning to make the merlin’s photo session. We sat under the camouflage nets near the public road. Of course, a pair of parents noticed us but only the merlins’ mother flew over our heads to do a threat assessment. Then the normal daily life of the family started. The female was always close to the nest and ready to react to emerging threats, like of skuas. The male, on the other hand, hunted and gave the prey to the female, who carried food to the nest and fed the young. Its predatory instinct of a female, or perhaps the need to provide more food for the young, was so strong that it penetrated nearby all the places where other birds could have their nests. That's how she got into conflict with a pair of whimbrels. The whimbrels strongly repelled attacks of the falcon. Unfortunately, most of the photos were taken from a considerable distance and framing was necessary. When I tried to take photos of birds' quarrels scene I instinctively pressed the shutter on the largest dynamic object in the frame, which later, while watching photos on the computer screen, turned out to be a whimbrel. But this time in fact I was more interested in the smaller rare species of birds – merlin than in the whimbrel. Nevertheless, Iceland again offered another beautiful spectacle. Well, as usually lack of time, if I could spend a few days more, I would have the possibility to take amazing photos as documentation of merlins’ habits and their struggle for raising their offspring.