Red Kite Party Okt-Nov 2025

Since I often drive the B3 between Northeim and Hannover, I noticed years ago the amount of red kites in the area of “Holtershausen” near Einbeck. Luckily there is a small parking area next to the “wolfsliebe” wolf reserve. Probably the high population of Kites and othe bird predators has sth to do with the wolfs but i havent figured it out yet.

One day there were around 6 red kites close together – just crazy. Unfortunately big birds in general seem to be very shy of humans (definetly not of cars) in Germany. But I mostly used my sony 20–600G f/5.6-6.3 @600mm on my APSC camera for those, which got me some amazing footage. In the future I plan to give more info on the kinds of birds. For example I shot some other big birds and am not 100% sure which kind they are – most of them are red kites though.

Since the bigger lense is much harder to handle with hands, my shutter speed varied a lot and im still adjusting it for birds in flight. Right now I need to shoot at least 1/3200, but i mostly go 1/4000 if i can now. Some older photos that I have are even 1/500 which was not a good idea. I did some work in Lightroom though and they look ok now. Here are the best of them – all handheld.

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 G @350mm f/6.3, 1/500, ISO125 cropped to 2053×1161

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 G @350mm f/6.3, 1/500, ISO100 cropped to 2276×1441

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G @600mm f/6.3, 1/320, ISO200 cropped to 1245×687

Very much lining the colourfull landscape and setting of the birds in those:

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G @600mm f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO640 6192×4128 (first one cropped to 5289×3145)

I got really lucky with wheather and animal count as well as distance on this day (31st of Okt.). Those photos I shot about 1.3x underexposed to get ISO down because I was stupid…when I look at the results, im still happy with them though:

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G @588mm f/6.3, 1/4000, ISO500 1573×1624

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G @588mm f/6.3, 1/4000, ISO500 3025×1767

Time and location: Okt 2025, location: Holtershausen near Einbeck

Shot with: a6700, 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G @588mm f/6.3, 1/4000, ISO500 3379×2087

What I noticed about some of my photos was, that some parts of the birds werent sharp enough, when they were big in the frame. I learned, that i would have to stop down from f/6.3 to f/8, to solve this problem, which I did. I will probably write about stopping down some other time.

What I liked about this day: I tried to be very quiet and suprised one red kite in a tree. It didnt look happy about that but i figure my distance was still ok (must have been still >100m)