My first Wallcreeper was a bird in the Spanish Pyrenees in April 1996 on a University of East Anglia Bird Club trip to the area and North-east Spain. We had passed over the high Pyrenees in a massive snow storm and dropped down on the Spanish side where the snow thinned and we camped. The following morning we explored the crags around the camp site and as the snow had forced alpine birds down we had several Alpine Accentors and a superb Wallcreeper feeding in a small cave. Odd birds followed in the Pyrenees in later years and in the the mid 2000’s with cheap air travel opening up long weekend birding trips, four of us headed to the Camargue and Les Alpilles in January or February of 2004, 2005, 2008 and again in 2010 tempted by close encounters with Alpine Accentors, Greater Flamingos and hopefully the Wallcreepers that winter on the cliffs at Les Baux. By 2010 I had some heavy weight DSLR equipment with a Canon 1D3 and a Canon 500f4 lens with converters. This type of gear though comes with a weight issue and to get close to the cliffs on the south side of Les Baux meant scrambling up through the vegetation covered scree slopes, no mean feat with a lot of expensive and heavy camera gear and a bad back. Finding the Wallcreepers in a scope is one thing but getting anywhere near a decent image requires a very large slice of luck and a lot of back ache! On this occasion the Wallcreeper we were watching had come down quite low and was occasionally flying under the overhang of the cliff searching for food in the honeycombed cliff face. A perched shot of a Wallcreeper with grey, black and white with a bit of crimson if you are lucky is one thing but the shot you want is of the open wing, best obtained when the bird is in flight and the wings are open. It is all a very big ask and I had spent a long time getting some half decent images when I suddenly saw this bird coming towards me along the cliff. Getting it in focus was the first problem with a cluttered background but somehow I managed to lock onto the bird and fired. Of three shots that were in focus and had the bird in this was the killer image. Yes it was small in the frame, full frame image below, but it was the shot I wanted and its intense stare up into the cliff in its search for food combined with the pattern of the honeycomb rocks adds to the impact.

Canon 1D3 with Canon 500f4 lens and 1.4x converter

1/1600th f5.6 at 800ISO