I made a quick visit to the Hendrie Valley Sanctuary a couple of days ago hoping to photograph some ospreys fishing. Nature didn’t cooperate in that regard but did supply some swallows with fledglings.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

A number of swallow chicks were perched on some dead branches of a tree, providing me with a decent shooting angle.

The parent birds returned to the branches on a periodic basis to feed their young. As always, the adult birds were like erratic rocket ships as they zipped through the air.

The parent birds would either quickly touch down to feed their chicks, or do a quick hover feeding.

No matter how often the adult birds returned with food, the fledglings’ appetites seemed insatiable.

The adult birds arrived and left so quickly that even shooting in AF-C at 10 frames-per-second would only yield a few, usable images. The capture above of an in-flight adult feeding its perched chick was my best capture of the day.

The very next frame in the AF-C run didn’t have the same visual impact due to the change in wing position of the adult bird.

At times the adults seemed to be a bit perplexed as to which chick to feed when they arrived back at the perched fledglings. While these swallows were not my intended subject during my visit, they did provide a good level of challenge trying to capture them.

Technical Note:
All photographs were captured hand-held using Nikon 1 gear as per the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using my standard process of DxO PhotoLab, CS6, and the Nik Collection.

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