Is Spring on the way?

Winter has barely begun and yet today I saw a pair of swans busily preparing for a clutch of eggs! They were nest building.

The male swan was obviously the one in the water while his mate sat on the top of the heap and made things tidy.

The male would plunge his head deep in the water and pull up the weeds from the bottom and place them on the heap.

The female would remain where she was seated and spread the leaves and push them so they were tangled together and would stay together.

Since a moat had been cleared all around the nest the male swan had to move further and further away to find more weeds. Rather than swim back to the nest with each mouthful he would be like an excavator - pulling up the weeds from his right side, swinging his long neck around so that he could deposit them on his left side.

While he was working as hard as this his mate was getting rather bored so she curled her head back over her body and had a bit of a snooze. After all, unless the weeds were put onto the heap she had nothing to do!

I would have loved to have taken video of this nest building - I was using the 70-300mm lens at full stretch - but without a tripod no one would have the stomach to watch such a bouncy film! All these shots were taken hand held and for such an undertaking I upped the shutter speed and increased the ISO so that there would be plenty of light on this rather dull day. The ISO was 640 and my shutter speed was 1/500 second (for all the shots). Since Shutter Priority was chosen the camera took care of the Aperture.
A fast shutter speed is recommended when using the full zoom on a compact camera with a zoom such as 16x or 24x, such cameras do allow the user to select this. The faster shutter speed gives you much sharper images because you will not get motion blur (from your own hands shaking).
AJ