I've managed to get the Lynx video working so Here it is...

 

This was taken hand held digiscoped with the S95, I'm pretty pleased with it.  An Awesome beast.

You'll be aware that I got rid of my DSLR last year when the 50D body expired.  Well I've been looking for another option for the last 6 months or so.  A couple of days before leaving for Spain I took the plunge and bought a Panny Lumix FZ150.  Here's a few shots with it, they are taken in RAW and straight out of the camera just saved for web in Photoshop with no processing done.

 

The noise visible in the underwings on these Vultures is actually pissing rain!

Dan looking the wrong way for once!

 Some of these I'm fairly happy with, I have to keep telling myself it's not a DSLR but I'm sure a really good image from this camera with some clever photoshop work can rival the quality I was getting form the 50D.  I tried some processing on a couple of these pics but the raptors against the sky don't seem to respond much to the tweaks I was trying and the Iberian flava although pleasant wasn't close enough to really resolve enough detail to bring the quality up afterwards.

That said though it's tiny and weighs nothing, it will come into it's own in the autumn on Shetland for grabbing record shots of anything I'm lucky enough to stumble upon!

The middle ground may prove to be the way I go eventually though, I was mighty impressed with the Panny GH2 it has the same super fast focus of the FZ150 but has interchangeable lenses and a better processor, with the 100-300 zoom it weighs a third of the weight of a 7d plus 100-400 and is about a quarter the size.  The only problem with it is the viewfinder blacks out between shots, hopefully this will be sorted in the next version.

Right it's been ages since I wrote any shite on here and a few mates have been giving me grief over it so I aim to make amends and write a load of bollocks about a few things over the next few weeks.

So what has happened since April, well in birding terms not fuckin much.  I was away in Scotland at the end of May so I missed the Orphean Warbler at Hartlepool which was a bit if a wounder, but not as much as missing the Gull billed Tern at Hatfield/Thorne wherever it was.  Several of the top Yorkshire boys connected with that one including reinstated top man Dave Hursthouse, he'd recently drawn level with the charlatan who was pretending to be at the head of the field when he gripped back Pallid Harrier, then with the Tern went back clear.  It's coming to something when almost every lister in the county is happy for a Derbyshire man to be number one in God's country!!!

I went to Spain on my mate Jim's stag do in early May and met a few new Dutch friends, we had a great laugh, especially with Rene Pop who I shared a car with for the week, he had me in stitches and vice versa.  I can't really tell you anything more about it cos it's the law of the stag!  I suppose it's OK to say we saw lots of good birds and Iberian Lynx, I'll put some pics up shortly, I've tried to put some vid up but it's dicking about and won't have it!  So here's a pic instead.

Iberian Lynx

I honestly thought that was about all we would see of these beasts but within 10 minutes of getting to the viewpoint Rene had found this...