Tag: Wildlife photography
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Collared Dove
An adult pair were regular visitors earlier in the year as usual, but I haven’t seen them for weeks. Then two appeared this morning, but something was different and not just in their slightly fluffy appearance. They were shy and reticent, staying in the tree. I think they are juveniles and like to think the…
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Rattus norvegicus, George Monbiot and a few more garden birds
Rats Rattus norvegicus, variously know as the Norway rat, sewer rat, brown rat, wharf rat, common rat and Hanover rat. I had noticed an unusual although not unpleasant smell in the shed some weeks ago and some minor evidence of rodent damage. If I ignore it for long enough, I thought, it will go away.…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part III
The Bedwyns Which sounds like a family name from a Jane Austen novel. Again starting where I left off, there was a surprise under Little Bedwyn bridge. A pair of Muscovy ducks. I had seen a male before but never a female and wasn’t immediately sure who I was looking at. I slowly pushed my…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part II
Hungerford to Little Bedwyn I started a little east of Hungerford at Lower Denford, exactly where I had stopped on the previous trip (I do like to be thorough), aiming for Little Bedwyn. I covered around eleven miles, the last two on the way back on foot following a front wheel puncture. Recognising the weight…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal, Part I
This is one of those marvels of engineering which we are lucky enough to have running through our village. I have spent a lot of time on and alongside it over the years, mostly with the children. It has long been an ambition to follow the towpath the entire distance, if only in short sections…
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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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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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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 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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Magpies in colour, Polar Bears, Komodo Dragons, Songbirds and Wood Pigeons, and Spring
Magpies I cannot quite believe I had never noticed before that Magpies are far from being black and white. It was only yesterday with the sunlight at just the right angle that I saw the marvellous iridescent blue on the wings and green and blue on the tail. The photo at the head of this…
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Long-tailed Tits
I have seen these adorable little birds a few times, in small groups (they are highly sociable), once at a distance in Norfolk and once, fleetingly, locally. They are not uncommon but they never sit still for long, generally not more than a second. Collins Bird Guide describes them as restless. I had never seen…
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Boring brown birds
Of course I don’t think they’re boring, no bird is boring to me, but I have heard it said of these two, a female Blackbird and a Dunnock. I rest my case with these photos showing their striking and complex markings.
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A few more garden bird photos
I have been trying to take some pictures which are a bit different with, preferably, the birds away from the feeders in a more natural setting, which is of course much harder. The smaller birds especially do not hang around and pose nicely – they usually fly off the second you have established focus. These…
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Books about Bird Names
I have often sung the praises of Stephen Moss’ Mrs Moreau’s Warbler; how birds got their names, Guardian Faber, 2018 especially in Animal Wild. In an update to this post Birdwatch, HART Wildlife Rescue and other wildlife notes and news – Animal Wild I reviewed The Vanishing Mew Gull; a guide to the bird names of…
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British Wildlife magazine December 2024; Birdwatch February 2025
British Wildlife, Volume 36, Number 3 The Common Lizard on the cover somehow looks relaxed and malevolent at the same time. The issue opens with a piece questioning whether Ireland’s Lusitanian heathers are in fact Spanish. I am sure it’s fascinating but to be honest I struggle to care terribly much. Brett Westwood in his…
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The return of a Chaffinch
I worry about my garden birds. I quietly apologise to them if I am late filling the feeders in the mornings. Where have the Greenfinches and Chaffinches been since the Spring? There was a rare day recently when I saw not a single Great Tit but happily they are all now back. I had just…
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Farmoor Reservoir
This was a recommendation from another volunteer at HART Wildlife Rescue. At HART a female Mallard has been taken in having been found impaled and immobilised by two fishing hooks (one with three prongs), the line wrapped around or somehow attached to a tree. Some anglers think nothing of abandoning their gear like this, used…
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Slimbridge Wetland Centre
This is a rather gloomy post, so at the end is a short list of twelve reasons the RSPB has given to celebrate in the form of wildlife successes this year. I last went to Slimbridge ten years ago with my children. It was very sobering to visit again this week and to see it…
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BTO, RSPB, BBOWT, BirdGuides and Tamanend
I usually review and summarise the British Trust for Ornithology’s news magazine at some length, but I have to say that I found the winter 2024 edition rather lacklustre. It features a Harlequin Duck (I prefer the less gaudy Mandarins) on the cover to accompany a piece about the hoary and difficult subject of invasive…
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A Jay, a Magpie and Birdwatch magazine December 2024
Magpies are pretty common, I see them all the time, but I have only ever seen a Jay perhaps two or three times in my life. Their colours, both delicate and bold, are beyond words. At Hart Wildlife Rescue, in the isolation room again, I was entrusted with five hedgehogs and moving a Jay and…
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A Swan, a Badger, a Gyrfalcon, a Fox, and Squirrel and Songbird theatre
A first for me at HART Wildlife Rescue this week. Whilst others worked inside with the hedgehogs, I was assigned the Collared and Stock Doves and Feral Pigeons outside, which I am used to, and a Mute Swan, which I am not. The columbines flapped about a fair bit in the aviary but soon calmed…
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Sett survey November 24 with many fungi
This was our most outright enjoyable survey for some time with quite the profusion of wildlife, overshadowed only by the knowledge that the area (not far from me) is commonly and currently used for hare coursing, which is of course illegal. Just the day before a woman had remonstrated with a perpetrator from her window.…
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Even more fungi, the Tree Register and a not so welcome presence in my hair
A leisurely two and a half mile walk through Bowdown Woods this time, a BBOWT reserve which is surprisingly situated not far from Newbury and Thatcham, Berkshire and close to a road (although not the way my satnav tortuously sent me, through a long line of industrial estates). I saw all of two other people…
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Nuthatch!
There is a wonderful constant flurry of Blue Tits, Great Tits (they are very vocal this morning) and Sparrows at my feeders and a regular Great Spotted Woodpecker. I have seen a Nuthatch before, but never in my garden. I have gently (I hope) poked fun at certain twitchers and their adrenalin rushes and sleepless…
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A few more fungi, local poaching, Thames Water and the budget
We are fortunate to have another natural archway very close by. This leads to Barton Court, formerly the home of Sir Terence Conran, now of Pippa Middleton and her family. It was a favourite walk or cycle with the children and we knew it as the conker way (as opposed to the donkey way, or…
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Birdwatch November 2024
When I said to one of the tour leaders on my trip to Norfolk that the egret was my favourite bird, he asked which one. I said I really didn’t mind – Great, Little or Cattle. They share an extraordinary elegance. I should have known it wouldn’t be as simple as that. There are both…
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Wildlife crime and protest
Illustrated, for no particular reason, with photos from a recent short walk along the canal at Hungerford, showing a few common hybrid Mallards and a Moorhen. A new report from the RSPB on the illegal killing of birds of prey, protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, uses data collected over…
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Focus on fungi
I spent a very happy and sunny afternoon at Snelsmore Common, a local nature reserve renowned for its variety of heathland, mires and woodland. It brought back happy memories – I used to take the children there regularly for walks and cycle rides. Sadly the old fire tower has gone, pulled down because of vandalism…
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Snakes, Amur Falcons, Gulls, Swans, Pigeons and Trees
As is often the case, this particular tangential pathway began with the answer to a crossword clue, a word I had not come across before: Ringhals. Also known as the Rinkhals, this turns out to be a highly venomous spitting cobra-like snake. The name seemed to me likely Afrikaans, and indeed it is originally a…
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British Wildlife magazine October 2024
Volume 36, Number 1 Following the first article, “Rewilding and the woodland ground flora”, Brett Westwood declares himself a psammophile, a word new to me, meaning species which thrive in sandy soils. I also learn from him of ventifacts, “glacial drift pebbles smoothed by windblown sand.” What a beautiful, poetic definition. He argues that although…
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If you go down to the woods today…
If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise,For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certainBecause today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic. Well I wasn’t really expecting teddy bears nor a…
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Birds & bees
I have already posted the image above (Teal) in one of the Norfolk trip posts but thought it deserved a second outing. I love the colours. E-mail news from Birdguides is in. Cattle Egret, seen in Norfolk, are as I suspected a relatively recent phenomenon here in terms of numbers and they are doing well.…
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Birdwatch / BTO News / The RSPB Magazine Autumn 2024
I found this issue of BTO News tough going, mostly because none of the news is good, especially when it comes to seabirds as has been widely reported. A piece on Yorkshire is, frankly, as depressing as the rest mostly recording species declines. Birdwatch is altogether more upbeat, reporting the upswing in the Cornish Chough…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part V, Kelling Heath and Roydon Common
At Kelling Heath (an SSSI) our brilliant guides managed to find us Mistle Thrush, a Stonechat and a Dartford Warbler, as well as a Kestrel. Steam trains were regularly passing through which was a touch surreal. Roydon Common is another Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve, again managed with very great care, including using happy Dartmoor Ponies…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part IV, Cley, Norfolk Wildlife Trust
Delightfully, the entire travel group had been given free membership of the Trust for a year, including an excellent welcome pack. It’s a smart idea – I suspect most of us will happily renew when the time comes. The pack consists of a very full calendar of wildlife events, a sticker, a guide in the…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part II, RSPB Snettisham and the Knot Spectacular
We visited on two consecutive days – any doubts about that given the early starts were quickly cast aside since each day was completely different. I will however conflate the two visits except to say that on the second, the light, especially for photography, was pretty much perfect. We arrived and parked up at around…
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Sett survey September 2024
For obvious reasons, locations of our surveys and especially the locations of setts is left deliberately vague but the combined presence of badgers and supposedly bio-secure (according to at least one farmer) free-ranging cattle on Greenham Common in Berkshire is so well-known and controversial that there seems little harm in saying that we spent some…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part I
This was a trip lasting almost five days with Wildlife Worldwide, a firm I have travelled with before, with mostly great results. They were twelve other wildlife lovers (we all got along very well and the spirit was positive and good-humoured) and two excellent and supremely knowledgeable tour leaders, Nick Acheson and Ed Hutchings. Nick…
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British Wildlife magazine August 2024
Volume 35, Number 8 Another terrific issue. I have illustrated this post with various recent wildlife photographs of my own. “The surreptitious westward advance of the Harbour Seal” is the title of the lead piece by Stephen Westcott. Harbour and Grey Seals were not treated as distinct species until as recently 1936. The former, which…
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Avian Architecture. Book review. Part I
Avian Architecture, How Birds Design, Engineer and Build, by Peter Goodfellow, Princeton University Press, 2024, revised and expanded edition. With a foreword by consultant editor Professor Tony D. Williams. Having had a fair few disappointments in my reading lately, this is one I have been saving up and it absolutely does not disappoint. Unsurprisingly, given…
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Birdwatch September 2024
The recovery of the Peregrine Falcon, a species which faced extinction in the UK in the 1950s (pesticides and illegal persecution of course), is welcomed – there are now 1,402 pairs, 62 of them thriving on man-made structures. There is much excitement about rare seabird sightings tempered with a concern that climate change is probably…
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Turnstones. A return to Titchfield Haven
I had been waiting for ages for decent weather to revisit this beautiful nature reserve on the south coast which had half a chapter to itself in Animal Wild. Unfortunately most of it turned out to be closed for maintenance. Either I had checked an outdate version of the website or I hadn’t looked at…
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Dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies
Having waited impatiently for a week for the right weather to return to the idyllic spot on the River Lambourn we found on the last sett survey, it seems the gods of wildlife photography were smiling on me on this sunny, windless morning. Obligingly, these Beautiful Demoiselles damselflies were exactly where we saw them a…
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Wildlife rescue and protest round-up
At HART Wildlife Rescue the busy season has just peaked. Monday was a relatively easy morning with eight volunteers in (six is really the minimum needed, sometimes there are only two) and most of the ducks and geese released or about to be. There are still plenty of hedgehogs though, foxes, fledglings and nestlings and…
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Sett survey August 2024 and a squirrel
This month we surveyed conveniently close to home, although it was not in an area I had previously explored. We saw a number of setts, a few already known to us, a couple were new. They were all active and showed signs of moderate use, but not more than that. The first few hours were…
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Butterflies at last
Only a few, and only one or at most two of each species to visit the garden this year, but it is something I suppose. The Comma above (love the name), readily identifiable by its somewhat raggedy appearance has been the only one to begin to stay still long enough to be photographed, but I…
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British Wildlife magazine June 2024
Volume 35, Number 7 The striking cover this month shows a plankton, the polycheate Tomopteris, one of many superb photographs illustrating the article about marine plankton in Milford Haven. The issue opens with an excellent but thoroughly depressing article by Tommy Greene about Lough Neagh. The plight of Lake Windermere has been well publicised, but…
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Birdwatch August 2024
This beautiful Collared Dove enjoyed a drink with perfect timing, just as I finished writing this post and was wondering what to use as the headline image. I recently wrote that I tend to avoid blogging about birds in other parts of the world because it stretched the limits of what my brain could absorb.…
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Blacknest Fields
After a delicious lunch at the nearby Anchor inn (the chef really knows what he is doing, creating a chocolate mint ice cream which tastes exactly like an After Eight and seafood arancini with saffron aioli), I joined a small group for a tour of this gorgeous eight-acre site in Hampshire on Sunday. BLACKNEST FIELDS…
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Seagulls, Jackdaws and a House Martin
Having attended the BTO’s online seabird ecology course Seabird ecology, seabird decline – and a Wren and a House Martin – Animal Wild during which we learnt of the dire state of play, that Kittiwakes and Herring Gulls are red listed and a further five species of gull are amber listed, it made my blood…
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The RPSB Magazine Summer/Autumn 2024
This magazine keeps getting better. I am especially taken with the fact that it isn’t all only about birds – there are pieces about photographing wild boar, three of our native reptiles, dolphins, moths, seagrass, beavers, natterjack toads and wood ant nests. There is a superb photo of a Black-necked grebe doing well at the…
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HART Wildlife Rescue
Another Monday, another morning at this wonderful place which does so much for wildlife. We are phenomenally busy at this time of year, the phone rings non-stop, people turn up with animals (including, yesterday, a young Kestrel) in cardboard boxes in a steady stream, and we were very short of volunteers. So it was that…
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Birdwatch July 2024
The issue opens with a celebration of the success story of the Avocet (the symbol of the RSPB), pictured above. There’s news of unusual sightings of a Booted Eagle in Cornwall, Ireland’s first Yellow-crowned Night Heron (featured on the cover of the magazine), Britain’s first Indian Golden Oriole in Northumberland, an Indigo Bunting in Whitburn…
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Seabird ecology, seabird decline – and a Wren and a House Martin
This was an online course run by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). I have hugely enjoyed all of their bird ID courses and this one had the advantage of being entirely free. It was a serious and sobering couple of hours. Firstly though, in the garden two days ago I saw, for the first…
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Wildlife notes
I spotted this beautiful scarlet tiger moth this morning. This insect photo was taken not with my microscope camera gadget this time but just with my phone, incredibly. Two of these ducklings were taken to our local vet and the other four brought in the following day. I drove them down to HART Wildlife Rescue…