Every night i try to get a different picture of the mice, that i have been watching for the last few weeks. Following on from my last blog, i’m trying to fill in the missing images in my picture story.
This image show one of the mice gathering grain. Each mouse will spend about five seconds collecting and storing the grain in there cheeks before sprinting off back to their food store.
The mice will take most things that are easily accessible. No matter what size, they will eventually make it disappear into there homes under the slabs. I’ve even seen a baby mouse collecting dried slugs on several occasions. The adult mice don’t seem interested by them.
The other day i placed some large pieces of bread out. As seen from previous occasions a mouse tackling a large piece of bread is always an amusing situation.
So here it is, a mouse with a piece of bread nearly as big as itself. Nine times out of ten the mouse will use the same route to and from its home. So i positioned the plane of focus where it it would usually go. A challenge in itself as the plane of focus on a 500mm lens is pretty much a hairline. Once in position i lock off the tripod head movement and wait for the mouse to cross the cameras field of view. The challenge is to the get the mouse nicely framed without the tail or anything else out of the frame. This usually lasts about one picture. So timing is of the essence.
The shot i got was pleasing, but still room for improvement.