Blog
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A touch of summer
2019-06-23 17:06:26 UTC
It’s late June but it’s been a cold and wet summer month so far and I’ve been away working for most of it. Yesterday, just after midsummer’s day I found a warm sunny day and popped out to a local wetland / heath area (yes, a bit of a contradiction…
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A few from today: Some of our larger water birds
2019-06-01 17:51:08 UTC
I thought I’d just pop up some of todays photos taken while on one of my regular dog walks. All of these were taken at our large pond at the wildlife reserve. Nothing particularly rare but it’s always good to see out two resident herons (Grey Heron and Common Egret)…
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Slow Worm - First of the Year
2019-05-05 12:08:06 UTC
It’s the 5th May and today was the first time this year that I’ve seen a slow worm. We had a warm period in March but things have been cooler since and the last few days have been quite cold again. This one was trying to warm up and wasn’t…
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Long Tailed Tit - Visualised and Realised
2019-04-29 09:30:55 UTC
I’ve posted here a few times about Long Tailed Tits and my attempts to photograph them. They are tiny birds (body about 6cm max with a 9cm tail) that have fascinating behaviours like congregating and raising young in family groups. They also build the most elaborate and beautiful little nests…
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Brace and a half for Easter
2019-04-20 17:51:13 UTC
Its Easter Saturday and its been a glorious day so we decided to visit Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. Wakehurst is the ‘country home’ of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. It’s a site of some biodiversity importance globally because it hosts the Millenium Seedbank; a repository of some 2…
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Long Tailed Tit
2019-04-19 17:46:42 UTC
Long Tailed Tits feature here from time to time. I’m rather fond of these little birds. We see them through the year in small family flocks in the autumn and winter in the garden and local woods and then as pairs in the breeding season and summer though they can…
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Early Lichen
2019-03-18 22:02:18 UTC
At this time of year the light and the season can play tricks. Driving down woodland bordered motorways oner the weekend I thought we could see the first blush of buds bursting in the trees and a green flush spreading across the trees. Indeed some trees like the hawthorn and…
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Rejuvenation
2019-03-02 17:52:42 UTC
I was walking around the perimeter of the wild meadows that border the heathland near where I live when something caught my attention. It was a dreary day and heavily overcast. However, there in the middle of the field of rough uncut grass, now laid flat after the winter, there…
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Squirrel Middens
2019-02-26 08:59:08 UTC
Here something of a leftover; twice over. First, I’d forgotten about these images because they were on my phone. They come from our trip to Canada last year but these were taken in the Rockies on a hiking trail near Jasper rather than on the West coast. Second, they are…
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Hare today…
2019-02-24 19:18:12 UTC
It has taken me a long time to find hares in my part of the country. I knew they were, or should be, here but they are nowhere near as common as they once were. Indeed, there seems to be a new danger for them, a form of myxomatosis that…
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Invisible Snipe
2018-12-29 23:39:35 UTC
A post Christmas outing to the WWT (Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) centre at Arundel today just t blow the cobwebs away. It was a very grey day; we have a high pressure system sitting over the UK at present so its calm, cool rather than cold and, yes, a thick…
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Great Bear Rainforest Journey Added
2018-12-24 10:57:13 UTC
After something of a delay and just in time for Christmas*, I have now added a new ‘journey’ page. This gives bit of contextual information of our trip ’Into the Great Bear Rainforest‘ and adds some other photos that don’t fall into any of the existing galleries. Hopefully, this wraps…
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Early winter challenge
2018-12-16 18:39:07 UTC
This blog post is a little different. Its early winter and true to form for December one of the first winter storm blew through on Saturday. It merely kissed the south east of England with a frigid blast and a fair douse of rain. Other parts of the country received…
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Common / Harbour / Harbor Seals
2018-11-28 11:00:05 UTC
There are a variety of names for this common seal that is widespread across the North Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. Here in the UK it tends to get called the common seal while, it seems, in North America it’s the Harbour / Harbor seal. (I rather suspect the 49th…
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Autumn Toadstool
2018-10-20 16:44:56 UTC
You really know when October has hit full flush as the fungi come out to play. On our walk with the dog I saw this pair of pristine fly agaric (Amanita Muscaria) had burst forth. I took a few photos with my iPhone but it didn’t really do…
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Look again
2018-10-13 18:44:42 UTC
I sometimes need to look at the pictures I’ve taken in a session a more than once to make sure I’ve made the best of them. It usually helps to leave a bit of time so I can be a bit more objective. Today I was doing a bit of…
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Bubble-netting experience
2018-10-08 21:09:39 UTC
If you ask anyone who has seen or wants to see Humpbacks what they would really likely to see then right after ‘breaching’ comes ‘bubble-netting’. Really, I think bubble-netting comes at top of the list but it was really too much to put that one on our wish-list. (We had…
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Back to the rut
2018-10-07 12:11:17 UTC
It’s early October so it must be deer rutting season… probably.
I’ve been observing the Red Deer rut for a good many years, certainly longer than I’ve been photographing it. Richmond Park towards the South Western side of London is one of the great places to watch in nearly 4…
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Introducing a Great Grizzly Mom
2018-09-19 09:10:08 UTC
A further teaser from my recent trip to the Great Bear Rain Forest on Canada’s North West Pacific coast. On a small estuarine inlet with a small river an meandering creeks and during the course of a very wet afternoon with torrential rain we found a number of grizzly bears…
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Flying Humpback Whales
2018-09-12 16:13:00 UTC
This is a bit of a teaser post as we are still travelling and I’m a long way from finished from processing photos from the trip. However, I did want to share a few of the images from another part of our trip to the ‘inside passage’ in British Columbia…
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From the land of the Spirit Bear
2018-09-07 19:00:39 UTC
We are in the midst of of a journey to Canada and have just completed the first leg of the trip to the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia’s Pacific West coast. This was a stunning trip with a small but great group of other visitors and a fantastic team…
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Fire and Brimstone…
2018-08-11 14:22:11 UTC
Slight exaggeration, no fire. But it has been dry enough this summer that a spark is all it would take to set the meadows and woodlands alight. Notwithstanding the, I do have a Brimstone butterfly here. I’m rather fond of Brimstones. Probably because they are usually the first butterflies to…
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The end of summer?
2018-08-01 09:02:44 UTC
Today is the 1st August - high summer. But out walking in my usual haunts it feels like the end of summer already. In March we has snow and ice and a delayed spring. Now, and after two months with blue skies and barely any rain until last weekend, it…
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Two ‘new’ species today
2018-07-08 11:38:33 UTC
It’s been super warm this summer in southern England, really the longest hot spell I can remember like this since my childhood and the summer of 1976. Plus I’ve been super busy at work and have had less time to get out photographing. Consequently, this morning I took the dog…
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Spotted some Great Woodpeckers
2018-05-30 09:14:57 UTC
On Sunday, while out walking, I heard the unmistakable chirping chatter of a nest full of Great Spotted Woodpeckers calling for food. After a bit of audio triangulation - that is walking round a stand of oaks I figured out where they were and located the hole. I returned later…