Blog
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Brace and a half for Easter
20 Apr 2019
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
19 Apr 2019
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
18 Mar 2019
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
02 Mar 2019
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
26 Feb 2019
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…
24 Feb 2019
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
29 Dec 2018
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
24 Dec 2018
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
16 Dec 2018
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
28 Nov 2018
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
20 Oct 2018
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
13 Oct 2018
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
08 Oct 2018
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
07 Oct 2018
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
19 Sep 2018
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
12 Sep 2018
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
07 Sep 2018
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…
11 Aug 2018
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?
01 Aug 2018
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
08 Jul 2018
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
30 May 2018
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…
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Young Fallow
28 May 2018
Yesterday morning, while on a flying visit to Leicestershire, I had the chance to go out for a short walk a tone of my favourite locations - Bradgate Park. It wasn’t really a photography trip so much as a exercise walk for the dog. Nevertheless, along came the camera and…
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More Mr Fox
27 Apr 2018
My ‘suburban fox’ project has been ongoing in the background and by that I mean mainly in the dark hours of the night. I’ve been trying to work out where they travel around and through my garden and had guessed wrong a few times. After using a couple of night…
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Spring & Slow-worms
21 Apr 2018
Spring has suddenly sprung this week as we have enjoyed a burst of warm weather. I keep an eye out at the time of year for emerging lizards and snakes. Never easy to see unless you know where to look. Earlier this week a large female grass snake (about two…
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A bit more of that spectacular ordinary…
16 Apr 2018
The mute swan is a very familiar sight on our rivers, canals and lakes. They are big birds and have a bit of a fearsome reputation (e.g breaking arms) which is partly deserved as they can be very territorial especially when they have young about. I’ve been chased by one…