Blog
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Fallow morning
2016-11-15 20:43:00 UTC
On Monday I had to pay a visit to Leicester. That’s a two and a half hour drive each way assuming the M3, M25 and M1 are actually moving. However, it gave me the chance to drop by one of my favourite spots of Bradgate park just north of the…
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Wildcat?
2016-11-11 18:49:00 UTC
Well, let’s be honest, no. These couple of pictures are not of a Wildcat but a common domestic cat. This afternoon, I was out seeing if anything cropped up when I spotted this tabby moving quietly and stealthily on the opposite bank of the canal. It was tracking several ducks…
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Brownsea Island
2016-10-27 17:45:00 UTC
I took the opportunity today of doing something I haven’t done before. I went down to Brownsea Islan to watch and photograph Red Squirrels. Autumn is firmly here and with it misty mornings, trees turning to russet and nuts galore. Perfect for squirrels.
The challenge is, in the UK, our…
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Vultures - Critically Endangered…
2016-10-18 08:47:00 UTC
Last week I was finishing off the Botswana journey pages when I decided, really as a bit of an afterthought, to give Vultures their own gallery rather than just bundle them in with a number of other savannah birds. My reason at the time was that they both made a…
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Botswana - now complete…
2016-10-13 10:40:00 UTC
It turned out to be a much greater undertaking than I’d intended but the section on the Botswana Journey is now (probably) complete. It amounts to 29 galleries, some 90 species of animals and about 325 photos!
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Quite a few further galleries have been added below the last blogged section…
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The big one…
2016-10-06 13:41:00 UTC
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Well, I could avoid it no longer. I just had to get the last of the ‘big 5’ onto the Botswana 2016 journey. With over 1600 photos of Elephants, it was quite a task to select a representative sample. I hope you enjoy these ones. You can jump straight to…
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Lots more…
2016-09-29 16:30:00 UTC
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It’s been a bit busy here both working but also trying to finish off the Botswana Trip. So busy that I’ve not really been able to pick up a camera since my return. So, since the last post you will find more galleries covering: Rollers, Warthogs, Buffalo, Storks, African Fish…
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Genets and Lions
2016-09-25 18:03:00 UTC
Momentum building again with a nocturnal Genet and near nocturnal Lions (two sets) making it onto the site today. You can find then from the Botswana page here.
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Photography Gear for an African Safari.
2016-09-19 16:57:00 UTC
Now, I’m not a veteran of the safari circuit. One trip over 25 years ago and a second recently hardly qualifies. Nevertheless, I have travelled quite a a lot with camera gear and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the gear to take because of the both the…
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More Botswana…
2016-09-19 12:04:00 UTC
Over the weekend, I completed the sorting, sifting and tagging of my Botswana trip photos. That means I can now find things quickly amongst the several thousand remaining images. So the pace of posting to the Journey page here has speeded up. I’ve just added sections on Leopards, Kingfishers and…
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Jewel of the Delta
2016-09-09 15:44:00 UTC
While I was trying to sort through some thousands of photos and get them into some semblance of order, I couldn’t resist putting up this post.
Here are a couple of Malachite Kingfishers. These are really small birds, about 14cm long. That makes then quite a bit smaller than our…
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‘Journeys’ - a new section for the site
2016-09-07 18:46:00 UTC
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I’ve just added a new section to the site menus that allows me to better publish collected photos from different journeys. Only one journey (Botswana Safari 2016) for the moment but I’ll be adding a good many photos to that trip over coming weeks.
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Botswana 2016…
2016-09-06 13:51:00 UTC
I’ve just got back this morning from a 17 day trip to Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Most of the time we spent on an extended safari through the Okavango region of Botswana. A quite extraordinary journey and a real eye-opener.
As I am now faced with something of a…
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Ratty?
2016-08-17 09:08:00 UTC
Well no, if you love the Wind in The Willows, Ratty the water rat was actually a water vole. These are pretty hard to find now in the UK but you can see a picture of one here. But the rat featured here is a true rat. The brown rat…
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Colour or Monochrome?
2016-08-11 21:03:00 UTC
I’ve been out again photographing herons along the canal… But this time I thought I’d post something different.
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Herons are striking monochrome birds; pretty much that is apart from those striking yellow eyes. I decided to process some in black and white. Take your pick. I find it quite difficult…
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Moorhen vs Crayfish
2016-08-05 16:02:00 UTC
I was out today, ostensibly looking for herons, when I came across something that I’d never seen before…
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Yes, a common-a-garden moorhen carrying a (dead) crayfish. The moorhen took the crayfish to a slightly submerged log where it tried to make a meal of it before deciding an exposed and…
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Heron stalking
2016-08-03 18:21:00 UTC
Herons are a bit of a reoccurring theme for me. I’ve many photos of nesting herons and flying herons but few decent photos of herons stalking and hunting except at a substantial distance. The reason is pretty simple. These may be big birds and they are noisy and bold with…
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The Puffins of Skomer Island
2016-07-15 23:07:00 UTC
I’ve just got back from Skomer Island. Now, Skomer Island has been on my ‘must visit’ list for some time. At the start of this year I put it firmly on the ‘this year list’ but it had to be in nesting time for the puffins. Prime time is June…
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Watching Kingfishers
2016-07-11 11:33:00 UTC
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Kingfishers are stunningly beautiful but elusive birds. About the most you can usually hope for is a sight of small electric blue bird perched at a distance. Often as not, you might just see no more than the streak of that blue as you accidentally startle one while you walk…
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Sparrowhawk update.
2016-07-08 21:48:00 UTC
It turned out I’d rather underestimated how close the sparrowhawk chicks were to fledging. Although sporting quite a lot of down then spent a lot of time preening and there were clouds of down being pulled out and floating about. Within a day of first seeing them, two of the…
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Sparrowhawk - short video clip
2016-07-05 10:16:00 UTC
An experiment that I thought I’d share. This is a slight departure from my still photography, I tried a little video work with my DSLR (Nikon D500). Reason being that this nest is quite obscured but a fair bit of action goes on in the nest and I wanted to…
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Sparrowhawk nesting…
2016-07-03 14:12:00 UTC
I’ve had a suspicion that we had a pair of sparrowhawks nesting in a particular area of woodland nearby. Mainly because I’d had several sightings in this one particular area. A week ago I spent a couple of hours watching the area but, though I saw an adult bird I…
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Yesterday, 100 years ago…
2016-07-02 13:28:00 UTC
… and about 180 miles away from where I live, across the southern downlands of England, the English Channel ( La Manche - vive la difference) and northern France, and just north of a marshy languid river called the Somme occurred the worst day of fighting ever suffered by the…
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When the grass is as high as a Green Woodpecker’s eye
2016-06-26 08:39:00 UTC
We are now firmly into the English summer now, past the summer solstice and the days are getting shorter again. I thought I’d post this photo of a green woodpecker. Why? Well, right now, the green woodpeckers are pretty much invisible. The meadow grass is now approaching two feet high…
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Raising offspring part 2…
2016-06-05 21:12:00 UTC
In the last post, I talked about the predation of a Long Tailed Tit’s nest that I’d been watching and commented that it was tough raising young. Roll forward six weeks and I was getting into my car to go to work when I spotted the unmistakable sight of another…