Month: March 2025
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Garden trees, shrubs & flowers, Magpies, Taxonomy, The Urban Birder, Ruddy Ducks and Temple Elephants
Garden trees, shrubs and flowers I have spent the morning going down rabbit-holes. Not literally of course. It began with a few photographs of trees and plants in the garden. I had been in a terrible muddle about the former and remembered the lesson never to assume anything, to question everything even when you are…
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Sparrow with attitude
I do think this female House Sparrow seems to have attitude, as in “What do you think you’re looking at?” BirdWatch magazine Bird Watch magazine is here again, issue 394, April 2025. I think I am coming to an end with it. It seems increasingly to be almost all about twitching rarities. That’s not really…
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Cleveland Lakes Nature Reserve
This is a roughly forty minute drive from me and is part of the Cotswold Lakes area, much of which is given over to water sports. It is also part of the Cotswold Water Park Site of Special Scientific Interest, is Cotswold Lakes Trust’s flagship site and consists of wetland lagoons, scrapes, reedbeds and ponds. I…
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Simon Barnes. How to be a Bad Botanist. Book review. Part II
Barnes (Simon). How to be a Bad Botanist. Simon & Schuster, 2024. Next, Barnes takes us on a walk along an “entangled riverbank”, then a chapter on domestication (mostly of plants) in which he surprises me: aurochs, the extinct ancestors of modern cattle, is an unusual word. Aurochs is both singular and plural but there are two…
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Simon Barnes. How to be a Bad Botanist. Book review. Part I
Barnes (Simon). How to be a Bad Botanist. Simon & Schuster, 2024. Following his earlier How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, Simon Barnes here writes as beautifully, accessibly and inspiringly as ever. He is a very fine judge of how best to impart information and enthusiasm and to philosophise without ever patronising. The book is…
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Coal Tit, Chaffinch, Bees and Worms
The Merlin app identified Coal Tits for me a some days ago, but I only caught a passing glance. Yesterday at least one was back, with the unmistakeable white nape patch and a slightly scruffy appearance. Fond though I am of them, I realised that I am not so keen on worried-looking birds, a description…
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Photographing birds in flight part II
Well now I can’t stop. And I seem to be getting there. Just in case anyone is reading this who has a P1000 or its recent successor and has been struggling as I have, the best settings seem to be shutter priority mode, shutter speed 1/2000, bright light if possible (or else increase exposure afterwards)…
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Photographing birds in flight
For some time I have been frustrated by what I thought was my camera’s inability to do this well, for smaller birds especially, to the extent that I seriously contemplated spending a serious sum of money on something better like the newish Nikon Z8 or Z9 with their astounding focussing and tracking capabilities. A friend…
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Ambelopoulia, Jeremy Clarkson, Steve Backshall, Maria Vincent Robinson, Thames Water, Cheltenham and more
There is no particular reason for the Wood Pigeon photos, except that I was pleased with them when I took them yesterday: the light and shadow in the picture above, the blink and the textural detail. Ambelopoulia I wrote about the consumption of Ortolan Buntings in France here: Spurn Migration Festival 2024 – Animal Wild…
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Oz magazine, Crufts, Penguins and litter-picking
My memories of Oz were triggered as I was browsing through the many profiles of antiquarian booksellers by Sheila Markham, created for the periodicals Bookdealer and The Book Collector. The profile in question is that of Carl Williams, a specialist in counterculture. He relates having sold a collection of protest posters to Felix Dennis, art…
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Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part II
The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024. I had thought to use these evening sky pictures purely as decoration for this post, then I thought they were inappropriate since land and sky are in a sense opposites of each other. But then I had the idea or even revelation…
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Bird Table – the BTO magazine for Garden Birdwatchers, BTO News & more
I picked up a year’s worth (2024) of the British Trust for Ornithology’s quarterly, generously illustrated magazine at the recent BTO conference in Manchester. As I said in my report on the conference, they will presumably be changing the name in short order since we are all now being discouraged from using bird tables at…
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British Wildlife magazine February 2025: the rest of the issue
Volume 36, Number 4 Tim Birkhead contributes “A portrait of the Great Auk”, only ever seen by just one or two scholars and ornithologists. It was driven to extinction in 1844 by dealers and museums and it is far from clear what it actually looked like. There seem to be just two images drawn from…
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British Wildlife magazine February 2025 on lead shot; fox hunting and more protest news
Volume 36, Number 4 There is invariably a superb photo on the cover, but this issue also has the text “An End in Sight for lead Ammunition?”, which is the opening editorial piece by Ruth Cromie. We have known about the toxicity of lead for over 2,000 years and its very severe effects on wildlife…
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Fallen oak
Having heard about this near a local farm I drove over hoping for a photo of a massive circular root system, but there are some nice textures here, especially the fungi. Sometimes it’s just the simplest things.
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Bird conference
British Trust for Ornithology, Annual Conference, Midland Hotel, Manchester, 1st March 2025 My first such conference (the only others I have attended have been about rare books and manuscripts), which tied in with visiting and staying with my younger daughter who is studying at Liverpool University, a long overdue but somewhat less than fruitful look…