Category: England

Mainly about reeds and rushes.

This week’s Nature Photo Challenge from Denzil is about water plants. My archive has not been especially revealing, and if you think I’m going out on this day of torrential rain to find more, you’ve got another think coming. Perhaps this is a chance to join in to with Jez’s Water Water Everywhere challenge too?

I’ll issue a challenge of my own too. I rather like the images below of spiky, statuesque reeds and grasses in black and white. But perhaps you prefer the original colour?

My first one is from the lake at Kiplin Hall, North Yorkshire

Then we’ll move to Lake Prespa in Greece, where the reeds obscure a handsome egret.

Then back to England, to the River Wye in Derbyshire.

This is a local Nature Reserve at Staveley, North Yorkshire on a bitingly cold day which at least the bulrushes could endure.

My header photo is also from Lake Prespa. I thought the egret and his reedy background demanded colour. Just as my final shot, taken in the gardens of the National Museum, Seoul. South Korea rather requires that splash of orange.

What’s the Point of Fences?

Here in England, in the countryside, we tend to rely on walls and hedges to divide up farms and fields, leaving fences to suburban gardens. Though fences are becoming increasingly common as the years pass. And sometimes fences are added to walls that are getting old and past it. In this shot, I think the fence may be past it too.

I’ve been looking for fences for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. I found fences to contain animals:

I found fences that have objects suspended from them:

… deliberately in the case of the moles. Molecatchers round here have the unhappy habit of suspending their deceased victims from fences, to advertise their services. And, perhaps, to deter other moles …

… accidentally in the case of sheep’s wool…

… deliberately in the case of young lovers declaring their – perhaps – lasting attachment to each other by attaching a padlock to a fence edging a bridge or harbour railing…

Then there are fences for perching on.

Stonechat

And there are fences for making statements. Here’s a local garden fence repurposed during Covid Lockdown in 2020 to thank the NHS. The nurse behind was part of our village’s scarecrow competition which celebrated keyworkers, from NHS staff to supermarket delivery drivers.

Local farmers at election time tend to give the oxygen of publicity to our sitting MP, by advertising him on their walls and fences It wasn’t me who bent the poster over, making it nearly illegible. But I’d definitely have given a hand to the perpetrator.

And finally, though in fact it’s my header photo: a fence in winter. It’s by way of being a historical curiosity. Snow is so last decade, or even last century.

For Dawn’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #258

Birds in Black

To go with the dismal weather we are having here in Britain this July, Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #20 asks us to focus on black. Inevitably, most of my shots are of birds. Let’s go …

That cormorant spreading its wings at the end of the pier at Whitby is a shot I’ve shown before and will probably do so again. I’m quite fond of it, so I’ve made it my header shot.

These shags are from the Farne Islands, currently closed to the public during the devastating avian ‘flu outbreak.

… And this is also where we saw these guillemots.

Here’s a blackbird, silhouetted against the evening sky.

I can’t resist taking you to Studley Royal, where I spend so much time – as do the jackdaws who think they own the place. Maybe they’re as much clerical grey as black. Never mind. I wonder if this is the one that Sarah (Travel with Me) snapped in her own response to this challenge?

Let’s go into town for the next two shots: starlings gathering on the weather vane of my grandchildren’s school, and a tame raven in Knaresborough.

But I can’t let you go without a sweet treat. Here are some juicy blackberries.

Blackberries

And in fact, I still can’t let you go. Not till I’ve shared this crow presiding over a street in Berlin. Or he was when I was last there.

I have just counted. I have offered you ‘Five-and-twenty black birds’. But not baked in a pie. And not twenty four. (English nursery rhyme, non-UK readers!)

And I’m going to add the cormorant – or any other of my featured birds of your choice – to IJ Khanewala’s Bird of the Week challenge.

A Simple Holiday

It’s summer – well, here in Europe it is anyway – and our thoughts turn to holidays. So when Philo of Philosophy through Photography fame threw down the challenge to celebrate Simplicity for Lens-Artists Challenge #257, I thought I’d leaf through my holiday albums and see what I could find.

Let’s go to the beach first, in Alnmouth Northumberland.

And then back to Yorkshire, to Wharfedale, where water coursing down the limestone slopes has formed this dramatically undulating landscape.

Let’s stay in Yorkshire, for harvest time at Sutton Bank.

Still, we can’t stay in England forever. Let’s catch a ferry across the North Sea.

We’ll nip across to Valencia, to l’Albufera: send a postcard as the header photo, before going south to Cádiz …

 … and all the way over to Greece …

… before coming back to England ..

…where poppies blow …

… and the fog descends…

Holiday well and truly over, I think.

Keep your distance: cactus alert!

This week, Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #18 invites us to look at cacti. Well, apart from this one, taken in Kew Gardens, London, I have nothing to offer from England.

In Spain however, they are two a penny. Here are two from ordinary back gardens in daughter Emily’s home town near Barcelona.

And here, more spectacularly, are a few taken in Jardín Botánico Histórico – La Concepción, Málaga. That’s where the header photo comes from too.

They’re striking things of course, cacti. But I tend to keep a very respectful distance from them. I’m quite relieved to have as the backdrop to my walks cowparsley, daisies and dandelions.

Portraits of two snails

It turns out that snails are not my specialist subject. Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #16 this week is all about these gastropod molluscs. And I have precisely two in my archive. The first one is my header photo. Here below is the second.

I’ve been walkabout with my camera, looking for more. But in these dry conditions – not a hope. Even the slugs have given up chewing every plant in sight.

And I can’t even name the snails I am showing you. Can anybody help?

The Call of the Chorus

I tend to wake up early in the morning. At this time of year, it’s no hardship at all, because I can lie in bed, listening to a concert like this …

These are moments of uncomplicated happiness. However, by now, almost mid-June, it’s tinged with sadness too, because I know that we’ve less than a month to go before this morning serenade quite simply … stops.

So when Rebecca gave us our monthly marching orders of a poem, one about about a bird in our part of the world, I knew I didn’t want to fall in line. I didn’t want to single out the blackbird, robin, thrush, chiff-chaff, wren … whatever. I wanted to celebrate them all – all those songbirds who contribute to this morning symphony of joy.

Dawn.
The sun creeps above the horizon …
Birds awaken.
Carolling, calling, crooning, chirping, chanting - 
a clamorous cacophony welcomes the day.

Cacophony is often seen as negative, as being a word for racket, dissonance, din. But for me there is no other word to describe the medley of sounds as dozens of local birds have their morning vocal work-out, defending their territory whilst raising a brood of chicks.

On of these mornings soon, before the chorus this year stops, I’ll get up, get organised and walk towards the sunrise, maybe one just like the one in my header photo, listening to those birds saluting the light.

Fake Flamenco: June 2023 Poetry Challenge

Hammad Rais’ Weekend Sky #104

Skyscapes

Amy has invited us to thumb through our archives for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #250 and choose skyscapes and clouds. I’ve found it impossible to be dispassionate about this. There’s something about these images that’s so bound up with memories that I can’t distinguish good photos from the merely ordinary. I’m transported to that place, that time, that set of souvenirs.

Take my header photo, for instance, which I’ve posted before, more than once. It takes me immediately to that special day when I was part of an evening boat trip quietly floating through the lagoons of l’Albufera near Valencia, while birds made their final flights as the sun settled below the horizon. It’s a memory which will never leave me, whether the photo is a winner or not.

Longish sea trips to the continent bring memories of languidly looking at cloudscapes from early morning till nightfall as our ship smoothly purrs towards its destination. Here’s one …

… or this…

Or there are those memories of January days in Cádiz. An unmissable part of our routine was to head to the beach at dusk to watch the sun slowly disappear into the sea.

This shot, from our time in the Balkans shows that a slightly neutral skyscape can be a perfect backdrop for a questing bird of prey. And this was a holiday of birdsong, wild flowers – and memories of a still wild landscape.

A quick visit to France, to the Minervois for a moody sky. This was a trip just a few weeks ago, when on the same day as this shot was taken, we saw tiny daffodils sheltering from the brisk wind.

I can’t leave this post without a local shot, taken as we walked a habitual path alongside our River Ure.