Hunting Deer at Richmond Park with my 300mm

Fooooood!!!

Richmond park is located about an hour from London via public transport. The underground takes you up to Richmond underground, and from there walk or take a short bus ride (take the bus!) to the gates of the park.

I went there on a Saturday, and it was very busy with people strolling the myriad paths, bikers moving at all speeds and cars clogging the roads. Well not clogging but there is a very low speed limit.

Now this is probably my first time out looking for wildlife in the wild. Unlike the Dingoes in Alice Springs where they'd come up to you at night. My first deer was sighted about half an hour in, under heavy shade just by the road side. I'd actually walked past it, and only noticed when I stopped to look around. Cool. I was certain I'd see more, so I continued on.


At the end of the day, I found a bunch of deer that were quite tolerant of me coming close. Unfortunately, my flash ran out of batteries at that time, and I could only shoot in ambient light. Which was bad.


The next few hours saw me little deer. The park *is* rather big, and they have free reign of it, seemingly moving at will. It reminds me of random encounters in final fantasy - I'd never know when it'd hit me. That in itself is an experience, to see a bunch of deer just gallop across your field of vision and disappear into the thickness of the woods. A binoculars is a very useful tool here. I have been using a cheap, compact Meade binos for the past half year or so, and constant scanning with these binos were key to finding the faraway deer. They are also very good to use at Zoos and wildlife parks just to observe the critters without bringing up the heavy weight camera.

While my main focus was to see deer, other fantastic stuff to observe were the birds - I observed one or two Carrion Crows (I think), big glossy black buggers. Didn't bother to shoot them as my 300mm was just too short. I did come across many packs of Jackdaws foraging in the shade, and they were a good subject to practice shooting birds in flight. They seem to be quite adverse to humans and tend to keep away, so the 300mm was a godsend. Most of the time they just fly away, and the rare times they fly across, I rarely can lock my focus fast enough. Out of the many shots I took probably only had one good BIF keeper:



Jackdaw zooming past

Being a park, there are also plants and flowers of all sorts around. I pulled out my 55mm 2.8 AIS and its extension tube and spent a good hour on my belly shooting just a bunch of flowers :)







Definitely will be going back in Winter during the rutting season, and hopefully with a longer lens.