Blog
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Looking at the ordinary…
05 Apr 2018
I’m often aware that I overlook the most ordinary of our wildlife, somehow seeing it as less interesting than the less familiar. Sometimes I have to force myself to look afresh.
At the weekend I again visited the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust site in Arundel. It’s feeling like a late…
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Gone, and on our watch…
20 Mar 2018
Today, the last male Northern White Rhino (known as ‘Sudan’) died after an illness at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya. That’s basically it, a major mammal ‘mega fauna’ species is now effectively extinct because there are just two females left.
And that has happened on our watch.
Photography theme?…
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Day 2 at the Great Crested Grebe house
14 Mar 2018
After yesterday’s luck at the lake with Great Crested Grebes I went back again today for a couple of hours and was treated to a repeat performance. After that is sitting in the cold for a couple of hours and getting a bit morose about the light dropping and everything…
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Scouting for Great Crested Grebes…
13 Mar 2018
The weather has been pretty poor for a while now. What with a short but vicious cold snap - “the Beast from the East” - at the end of Feb and the usual drab late winter it hasn’t really felt we were anywhere near spring. Today started grey and even…
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Urban Fox II
13 Feb 2018
I’m beginning to understand more about the movements of at least one of the local fox near my house. It (not sure if it’s a he or she yet) looks quite young and seems to visit about ever other night, sometimes every night. Timing is not very predictable but ranges…
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Kenya Mini Blog finished
18 Jan 2018
More than three months after our return from Kenya I’ve finally finished the mini-blog and sorting, processing and posting of the images from the trip. It has been fun revisiting many of the images and memories of the trip. I hope some of you visiting here may have enjoyed seeing…
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A mid January day…
14 Jan 2018
January leading into February can be a dreary time. For some days, we have been locked into oppressively low slate lidded skies that crush the very colour from the day. Coupled with a dampness that seeps into your bones this is not a time to fill you with enthusiasm for…
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One of those (good) days
07 Jan 2018
My dog walk yesterday turned out to be a bit of a surprise. The weather wasn’t great, a bit damp, cool but there was a little bit of sun being filtered through light cloud. So it was light enough to warrant carrying my camera. It started nicely when we, well…
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Water Rail First
05 Jan 2018
I was in need of a bit of fresh air this afternoon, especially as we had a window of a few hours between one stormy weather system and likely the next one. So I bowled down to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust site at Arundel to see what was about…
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[My] Urban Fox…
10 Dec 2017
We have a number of nocturnal visitors to our garden and surrounding streets, namely foxes and badgers. Last night was the first time I’ve managed to photograph one and get an image worth sharing. Getting this photo has not been a quick task…
It’s taken me, on and off, about…
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Lions of the Masai Mara
16 Nov 2017
I’ve been slowly adding photos to the Kenya mini blog so there are several more galleries there since the last time I posted. The latest is a collection of the Lions of the Masai Mara. Here’s one of my personal favourites.
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A mini ‘mass wildlife’ encounter…
22 Oct 2017
A word of warning, this post may not quite equate to the experience of wildebeest crossing the Mara river or seeing the migration of salmon being fed on by bears and wolves on the west coast of Canada and Alaska. No, this is a thoroughly British mini and very discrete…
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The Reteti Elephant Orphanage
20 Oct 2017
While in the Samburu County of the Matthews Mountains and the Namunyak wildlife conservancy in Kenya we visited the Reteti Elephant Orphanage. I’m not so much one for ‘cutesy’ cuddly viewings of captive baby animals set up for tourists. I’d usually avoid them like the plague as I’m rarely convinced…
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On those unpromising days…
09 Oct 2017
I felt in the need of a change of scene after being at home for a few days so this afternoon I went out for a bit of a drive to the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWT) at Arundel. It was one of those overcast, start of autumn, sort of…
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The B of the Bang…
04 Oct 2017
Occasionally, I feel strangely compelled to post about a photo that didn’t quite go my way; one that won’t appear in the galleries. This is such an occasion. While sorting through photos of cheetahs from our Kenya trip, this photo caught my attention. No, it’s not a great image in…
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Under Kenyan Skies - New Journey
01 Oct 2017
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I’ve just returned from a two week trip to Kenya. We safaried through three distinct parts of the country. We started in the middle/northern part of the Kenya in the Matthews Mountains of Samburu county, then moved South West a bit to the high plateau country of Laikipia and, finally,…
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A scruffy youngster
28 Aug 2017
Herons are striking and usually elegant birds with trailing and contrasting plumage. Consequently, there must be some mother that must be a bit ashamed as to how this juvenile went out into the world this year. Sure, it has got the right heron attitude of general and menacing distain but…
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Of Kayaks and Kingfishers
26 Aug 2017
From a few of the more recent posts, you might gather that I’ve been photographing quietly from a kayak I modified for the purpose. Now, I’m a long time kayaker and one of the joys of the sport is seeing wildlife while paddling. Sometimes that’s on remote Welsh rivers, sometimes…
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New Great Crested Grebes and a Heron
20 Aug 2017
Having acquired a new (old and decidedly second hand really) kayak recently and kitted it out a bit for photography I managed to get out a few time on a lake (‘flash’) on our local canal. I’ve spent some ‘quality time’ drifting about quietly near a family of Great Crested…
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Summer swallows
13 Aug 2017
I was out on our local canal today. More precisely on one of the ‘flashes’, with my camera. (A flash, on our canal at least, is an area of open water or a small lake through which the canal passes.) There were quite a lot of swallows around and I…
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Early harvest bounty
29 Jul 2017
The harvest time seems to be coming in early this year. It’s not even the end of July, yet I’ve been seeing ripe blackberries on brambles for a couple of weeks and here is a photo of ripening and ripe elderberries. Not so many of the ripe elderberries can be…
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A ‘banded young lady’…
21 Jul 2017
Granted, that title just doesn’t seem quite right. Nevertheless, it stands because I posted about a ‘beautiful young lady’ (Beautiful Demoiselle) a couple of weeks back. This one is the other Demoiselle damselfly we get in the UK; the Banded Demoiselle. Fairly obviously the ‘banded’ relates to the dark band…
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Kestrels - But in Guernsey?
17 Jul 2017
If you scan back in my blog, you will find I’ve been trying to take some images of kestrels in my local area (Hampshire). Unfortunately this has been a difficult gig for the reasons I’ve related in those posts. Consequently, I haven’t been wholly happy with the results so far…
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Damselflies Mating
12 Jul 2017
I’ve just added a new collection here featuring our Common Blue Damselfly exclusively in the act of mating and egg-laying. These were all taken one languid afternoon last week at the same spot on our local canal. I trust you enjoy.
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A beautiful young lady…
10 Jul 2017
Misleading title? Not at all; the name is right if a bit anglicised. We call this, possibly the most striking of our native damselflies, the ‘Beautiful Demoiselle’. But you need to be a bit relaxed about gender identity here because, despite the charming and quirky name, this is most definitely…