[Adey Baker]

Well you seem to be doing all right, Don! Using other people (with dogs) is a good trick - and if the birds do fly away, the dog-walkers get the blame and not the photographer!

Actually, I remember quite a few years ago 'twitching' a difficult wader at Felixtowe and a couple of well-known bird-photographers came along hoping to get 'the' shot in a bid to ascertain the identity of the bird once and for all. Having been shown where the bird was, together with several other waders, they promptly walked straight out towards the mud where they were feeding, having spotted a small mound behind which they intended to settle down to shoot the bird from cover. Predictably, the birds all flushed but within a minute of the photographers settling down the birds had wheeled round and landed right back where they had started! They were confident that this would happen from previous experience and, yes, they did get the shot that was used in a paper published in 'British Birds' showing why it was one species and not the rarer species hoped for.

Not all species are as obliging as these waders can be and once disturbed, some are gone for good! Some species that rarely encounter humans can be very approachable but each individual can react differently with some much more wary than others of the same species - you just have to get the 'feel' of each bird and if it looks like a flighty one then move on to one that's more obliging.

Conversely, some birds that have to put up with constant disturbance from humans, such as at the local park, etc., adopt a sort of indifference to all but the most intrusive activity. My local woodland has a good range of species but it is fully open to people who use the facility at every opportunity so any bird that wants to live there has to accept a constant stream of dog-walkers, etc., which they seem to do without to much concern.

Throughout the winter months a few people regularly put out food for the birds as they walk around the wood and they always seem to put the food on the nearest gate posts - purely out of convenience, I suppose - which means that any of the birds that accept the food are quite used to humans passing quite close. They just move a few feet farther up into the trees until folks have passed by before returning straight back to the food.

By putting some food (especially sunflower seeds) down for them at the usual spots and then waiting close by I've got quite a lot of real close-up shots of birds without taking any cover whatsoever! Not all species respond - you're never going to get a UK Woodpecker to feed out of your hand like Downy Woodpeckers seem to do in the USA - but many of the smaller species, such as the Tit family soon ignore you and get on with the job of feeding.

I find my close-focussing Sigma 400mm lens ideal in this kind of situation. With sufficient light, hand-holding is possible and you can rattle off several shots in order to get at least one sharp. The auto-focus is better, I find, as it's one less thing to 'fiddle' with and it gives you a constant grip on the lens to help keep it steady. A tripod can be useful but often the birds will come straight in, take a seed and fly off with it to stash it away somewhere. You never know for certain which branch they will perch on momentarily before dropping onto the seed, so hand-holding is much more flexible than tripod-mounting in this situation.

Many of the shots that I've got in the Birdforum gallery that are located at 'Burbage Wood,' 'Burbage Common' or 'Elmesthorpe Plantation' have been taken using this method.

By the way, Don, isn't the recommended 2x converter for your 400mm lens the TC301 model?