Under a crescent moon

Week 13, 23 March 2015 - Entertainment City, Doha

My son plays cricket on the pitch next to Entertainment City once a week, after work.

The past week, I saw an Egyptian Nightjar hawking under the lights on the pitch. As the daylight hours are now increasing, I took my camera this time and obviously the Nightjar never made an appearance.

While my son was warming up, I strolled around the grounds which have quite good habitat; palms, large casuarina and eucalyptus trees. Secretly I'm hoping to find Barn Owl - no luck with that species either/yet. 

I did however see a large mixed Hirundine flock passing high overhead after the sun had set. These were all taken with the Canon 100-400mm II, but birds were literally dots in the viewfinder..

In amongst the Barn Swallows were Red-rumped

Red-rumped Swallow (Cecropis daurica)

A few Common Swifts

Common Swift (Apus apus)

and only once I downloaded my images did I find that one was also an Alpine Swift - so that was an unexpected bonus.

Alpine Swift (Tachymarptis melba)

Tonight was a waxing crescent moon, with just a sliver visible and pretty cool with the Hirundines passing below it...

Crescent Moon and Swift

By now it was too dark for any more birds, so it was onto the cricket action as the practice match had started. So, I put the lens to the test under the lights with ISO cranked up to 4000 and was pretty happy with the results.

Cracking it away under the lights