Blog
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Ratty?
August 17, 2016
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?
August 11, 2016
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
August 5, 2016
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
August 3, 2016
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
July 15, 2016
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
July 11, 2016
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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.
July 8, 2016
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
July 5, 2016
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…
July 3, 2016
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…
July 2, 2016
… 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
June 26, 2016
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…
June 5, 2016
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…
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Raising offspring…
April 24, 2016
…is never easy but I don’t think we often realise how tough it really is for wildlife.
It’s been a busy spring, actually pretty cold in the UK after a mild winter. I’d hoped this post would be a bit of a record of a small project I was aiming…
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Heron time
February 15, 2016
It’s that time of year again. In early Jan, our local herons began occupying the nests in the heronry and staking their territory. Mid February and there is the start of nest building / repairing taking off in ernest. It will become increasingly noisy at the heronry now and no…
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Lucky or ready?
February 14, 2016
Yesterday was a very dull dank and, frankly, cold and nasty February day. I wasn’t really expecting to do much in the way of photography; particularly as I was ‘surfacing’ from having a pretty late night out with a few friends. Nevertheless, something cropped up unexpectedly and that was a…
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The quest for green woodpecker photographs continues…
January 27, 2016
I’ve posted before about trying to photograph green woodpeckers. As far as I can figure, they are just about the most cautious and shy bird I know of. Be anywhere in their vicinity and they will be aware of you and will often, in trees, even hide behind branches. Their…
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In Contrast…
January 7, 2016
I first became interested in photography in the age of 35mm film, well before digital cameras. Back then, I had access to a good darkroom (at university) and I did a fair bit of processing and printing of my black and white films. After leaving uni, I lost the access…
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Kestrels winter light
December 29, 2015
Today, I spent a couple of hours watching and following a Kestrel as it hunted around a local field that is intentionally conserved as a meadow. It was fascinating watching it’s behaviour quartering the field, using the breeze to hold station and resting in various trees around the field edge…
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Long Tailed Tit
December 24, 2015
The mild weather this winter has continued, as I write, well into December. It’s nearly Christmas and I’ve a few days off before the holiday and through into New Year. Unfortunately, the weather looks set to be mild but windy, grey and wet. Today we are just enjoying the trailing…
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It’s been a bit dark here recently…
December 14, 2015
OK, so it is winter. Not that I can complain that much. So far this winter has been remarkably warm and, in parts of the UK, remarkably wet. In Cumbria there have been floods of near biblical proportions and November was, apparently, the least sunny month on record. It’s on…
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Hacking about and mashing up…
November 22, 2015
The weather recently hasn’t been too conducive to much wildlife photography recently so I’ve been spending a bit of weekend time planning some future projects and also hacking around with gear to help this. One gear tinkering project has been to wireless enable an infrared beam trigger so that I…
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It’s not all about deer, today a kestrel stole the show.
October 25, 2015
The weather forecast promised clear skies over south east England for this morning so I couldn’t pass-up an early morning out photographing the rut again. I’ve now got a few hundred more very good images but I’m still missing a really dramatic battle of dominant stags. At times, the early…
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Wet day, worth going out?
October 24, 2015
Oh yes. I love taking the camera out in the rain because something unexpected often turns up.
Wildlife, like us, tend to hunker down a bit in the rain but there is always something going on. This heron was wrapped up and doing pretty much nothing but trying to keep…
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Butterflies and Moths
October 19, 2015
I’ve been doing a little more sorting and have added a small selection of images as above. If you enjoy the narrative stuff as an add on to the photos, please check the captions on this set. And see if you can find the wasp in one of this set…
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Experiments with iPhone 6S
October 18, 2015
Today started as one of those overcast, slightly damp and still autumn days that we get here in England. Towards the back end of the morning after I’d run out of excuses, the dog dragged me out for a walk. I’d decided not to take my normal camera. As a…