For Debbie at Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday: Rush.
Category: England
Herons World-Wide(ish)
Over at Don’t hold your Breath, IJ Khanewala features an Indian Pond Heron as his Bird of the Week. I remarked to him that herons get everywhere. And here’s the proof. I can’t claim to show examples from anything like every continent, much less every country where you’ll find herons, but here are just a few.
These are all from England: click on an image to find out where.
These two come from Spain, from l’Albufera near Valencia, and from Córdoba.
And the featured image comes from Busan in South Korea.
Not exactly a world-wide survey. But I go a small way towards proving my point.
Let’s Fill the Frame
The last two weeks’ Lens Artist Challenge had us focussing on all the eye could see in a single glance: seeking the symmetrical and the asymmetrical. This week we’re homing in on detail for Anne of Slow Shutter Speed.
In my last post I stayed pretty rural, and I’m doing that again, though beginning at the seaside. I think that Arctic tern in the featured photo is homing in on something: maybe something that’s bothering his newly-hatched youngsters.
Let’s go to a farm. Here are two sheep.
Did you think that a-sheep-is-a-sheep-is-a-sheep? Not at all. I’ve focussed on just six sheepy fleeces, filling the frame with six different styles of wool – I could have picked dozens more.
We’ll pop down to the duckpond. I’ve filled the frame with a female mallard. But let’s home in more closely:
We’ll get a touch exotic, and feature a peacock: yes, there are one or two farms round here that have peacocks on parade.
Sunflowers were exotic once in the UK. No longer. They’ve started to become a regular crop for some. And the bees are very pleased to have them.
Farmyards aren’t just about pretty things. There are gates and barns to be locked, and tractors to use and maintain – maybe not well enough, in this case..
So there we have it: getting up close to our findings down on the farm. I’m on my travels this week, and may not respond very promptly to comments. But I will get back to you – eventually.
In case you’re interested, reading from left to right from the top the wools represented are: Wensleydale; Cheviot; Leicester Longwool; Shetland; also Shetland; and … er … don’t know.
It’s a Sign …
This week, for the Lens-Artist Challenge, Johnbo bids us to seek out signs. My header photo was taken several years ago, but seems even more prescient now that it was then.
Let’s stay with the somewhat political, some more serious than others. Do click on each image to see it full size and read the explanatory caption.
Warning notices, some more serious than others. There’s even one from the Lockdown era. Remember that?
And a miscellany to finish off with: a tribute on our local buses after the death of Queen Elizabeth II; a light-hearted invitation to a coffee shop in Liverpool and a less than inviting hotel name in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, India.
Britain on the Edge
Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth, according to the fourth State of Nature (SON) Report, the product of a collaboration of environmental NGOs, academic institutions and government agencies, including Natural England. Depressingly, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are on the edge, as far as much of the natural world is concerned.
Look at the featured photo for instance, taken on one of those in-glorious-technicolor days of high summer, with an impossibly blue sky, and fields of golden wheat just waiting for harvest. It really shouldn’t be like that. There should be poppies, cornflowers, wild flowers in general poking their heads above the crop. There should be generous field margins and hedges, offering home, food and shelter to whole varieties of insects, small mammals and birds. Where can all this wildlife call home these days? Many of them are on the very edge of sustainability. Here’s another field, even nearer to home, equally mono-cultured.
These days grass grown for hay-making as winter feed is just that. Grass. Meadowland used to be so different, crammed with wildflowers that made much richer, more interesting fare for the cattle that rely on it as winter feed. And a mecca for insects : all-important bees among others – during its growing season. These days, it’s so rare that it’s not just meadowland, but a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
The farms nearer to our house have chosen to make do with narrow jumbles of poppies squeezed into narrow field margins, or at the edge of paths.
See these? These are swallows on a telegraph wire in mid-September one year recently, assembling prior to their big autumn migration. It didn’t happen this year. Swifts and swallows are on the edge of viability here, from habitat loss.
Let me show you something all-too common though, both in town and country. Litter. These images are hauls from litter-picks we’ve done not just in town centres, but down country lanes. Everything from a carelessly-tossed can to rather toxic rubble and waste illegally dumped in a hedge margin. Not just an eyesore, but habitat-damaging and a danger to the many small species that call such areas home.
This is meant to be a photo challenge, not a diatribe, so I’ll leave it there. There’s a lot more I could say, but I don’t have the images to support the argument. It’s for Patti’s Lens-Artists Challenge #269: On the edge. And it was inspired by Susan Rushton’s post for the same challenge. If you pop over and read it, you’ll see why.
Some Favourite Photos
This week, for the Lens Artists Challenge, Tina invites us to show off ten of our all-time favourite photos. Not only must we explain why we like them, but they have to be technically top-hole too. I can’t do it. When an image is freighted with memories, whether happy or exciting or astonishing, unpicking these from technical considerations is something this snap-shot-ist can’t do. I shall be disqualified. I can live with that.
I first ‘needed’ a camera when I had the chance to spend a month travelling in India in 2007. I was even more point-and-shoot than I am now. Here’s just one memory, taken from my hotel window in the French quarter of Pondicherry (as it was then called), Builders, both men and women, unstacking their consignment of bricks to begin their day’s work at 6.00 a.m. Some of my best memories come from staring out of that window: such as the women who cleaned the streets at night, sitting right in the middle of the road at 2.00 a.m. cheerfully chattering during their break.
By then, we were already living in France. How to pick just a few shots from that period? Let’s have a go. I’ll choose pale and delicate wild daffodils in the mountains just outside Foix, in such profusion it was almost impossible to avoid treading on them. I’ll choose pristine snow, many feet deep, just waiting for a Sunday snow-shoeing outing. The only sound was the snow itself, squeaking softly as we trod it down with our raquettes. I’ll choose a dramatic , never-repeated sunset which glowered over our small town one spring evening.
And sea-voyages. We’ve had a lot of those – back and forth to France when we lived there and came back here often to see family. Nowadays it’s because we need to get to Spain where my daughter and her family live. There’s often a dramatic skyscape.
And now North Yorkshire’s home, with its stone-walled Dales, its meadows and hills, its autumn fogs.
And then there’s Fountains Abbey, where I spend so much time volunteering. Can’t leave that out. We’re just coming into autumn, which may be my favourite season there. So the Abbey in Autumn in my featured photo.
So these are my choices today. Yesterday I might have chosen differently. Tomorrow I’d choose other shots.
PS. Can anybody tell me why WP is no longer always allowing me to centre my photos? Or – now that WP have made it impossible to comment directly onto a post, how to comment on a post that’s more than a couple of days old, such as Tina’s one about this challenge, and which is no longer reachable on the Reader?
Spider alert!
Denzil, in this week’s Nature Photo Challenge, asks us to hunt for spiders and their webs – something that it’s easy to do at this time of year in Britain. Only yesterday, a huge specimen was standing guard over the shoe-rack. But by the time I’d got my camera, he’d vanished. These then, are all archive photos, and unidentified. Helpful suggestions welcomed.
The first one is from India. Perhaps I J Khanewala can help? And the second is also not from England, but from La Rioja in Spain.
The third is from Masham Parish Church, and it’s dead. Is it even a spider?
For the rest, I offer a gallery of webs, mainly taken on misty moisty mornings, or in fog, lending them a mysterious and often ethereal quality.
These were taken in Dumfries and Galloway, in Cairnsmore of Fleet National Nature Reserve. As is the header photo.
The next group come from just down the road, near Sleningford Hall.
And lastly, we return to India, where a tunnel spider has made his complex lure.
Wild Animals in the Neighbourhood
This week, Denzil, in his Nature Photo Challenge, is eager to see what shots of wild animals we can come up with. Let’s see what I can find round here in the UK.
Squirrels, for sure. Grey squirrels certainly. They were first introduced to England from America in 1876 as an ornament to the gardens of stately homes, and by 1930, had largely eliminated our native red squirrels: though I have seen them, rarely, in parts of the Lake District and in Scotland. I have to admit this red squirrel was spotted in Spain.
What else?
- Rabbits by the score emerge at dusk to start nibbling.
- Hedgehogs have become depressingly rare. This photo is older than I’d like it to be.
- I came upon this toad on a riverside walk near home.
- One photo is very close to home. Field mice start to move into our kitchen as autumn arrives. This fellow is in a humane trap before being moved on and out. We don’t kid ourselves that this is super-humane. Dumping the poor creature in nearby but unfamiliar countryside is not likely to end well. But what to do?
I’m going to visit my son and family in London for the next two shots, because I see far more foxes there than here in the countryside. Recently, the house next door to them remained empty for a few summer weeks. A fox family took advantage.
The deer in nearby Studley Royal Deer Park are not exactly wild – but they’re not tame either- they’re never handled by humans: and some stags escape into the wild for their holidays before returning in time for the rut. Truly wild deer are common here, but not keen on photo opportunities: so here are two groups from the Deer Park: fallow deer in the shot below, and red deer stags in the featured photo.
We shouldn’t end though without a trip to the seaside. Let’s go to the Farne Islands and then to Pembrokeshire to do a spot of seal-spotting.
I’ve found that visiting posts from fellow-bloggers in far-flung parts of the globe has produced sights of -to me- very exotic creatures. I hope at least some of these shots will seem different to them.
Oh, I almost forgot. I seem to have given myself a task: collective nouns for the animals and creatures I feature. Here goes.
Squirrels: a scurry, a dray, a colony, and a squad. Rabbits: colony, nest, down, warren, bury, kindle, leash, trace, trip, drove, herd, fluffle, flick, husk, and wrack. Hedgehogs: a prickle, array. Toads: a knot, lump, a nest, a knab, a knob, a squiggle. Mice: horde, mischief, nest. Fox: earth, leash, skulk. Deer: herd, bunch, mob, rangale, bevy, parcel. Seals: bob, pod, herd, harem, colony, rookery, plump, spring, crash.
Time to Celebrate
This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, set by Donna, asks us to look at Time. So … I’ve decided to focus on traditions: traditions about celebration – long enjoyed, long maintained, and still meaningful in the communities where they take place.
Transhumance for instance. It’s that time of year when in the Pyrénées (and in other mountain regions too), near where we lived in France, the cattle and sheep are moved from the lush summer pastures in the mountains down to their winter quarters down on their lowland(ish) farms . They stay there till spring, and then they’re taken up again. And each time, it’s the excuse for a party. Here are some scenes from Seix a few years ago, of the upward part of the year.
They were dancing in Seix. We dance to celebrate wherever we live – always have. Here are Morris Dancers in England, traditional dancers in Catalonia (and more of them in the featured photo) and dancing for the big Harvest celebration of Chuseok in South Korea.
What next? How about Shrove Tuesday, the day when it’s the last excuse to have a bit of fun before the privations of Lent? The day when eggs and butter and other indulgences get used up in the making of pancakes, some of which end up in a race. Participants run the course, pan in hand, tossing their pancakes as they run towards the finishing line. It’s part of every Shrove Tuesday, as it has been for hundreds of years here in Ripon, and in towns and villages throughout the land.
Street entertainers have engaged out attention as long as there have been streets. Jugglers, Punch and Judy shows … anything goes.
Anyway, let’s finish off with a dance, the Sardana, dear to Catalonians for … well, centuries. It’s easy enough – join in the circle and just copy the person opposite you. Come on – you don’t even need a partner!
Further Adventures of Major General Algernon Gove
Poor Algernon (if I may be so familiar). I abandoned my Major General last month as he planned further destinations in a trip to invigorate him in his old age. He’s my stooge as I attempt to complete Paula’s Pick a Word Challenge. The five words Paula offers us are intended to be a stimulus to us to choose five appropriate photos: I decided a bit of verbal silliness would add a little extra difficulty. Not ‘alf. These are Paula’s chosen words: distinctive; floating; fortified; playful and saddle. Make something of that, Major General!
In case you’re not familiar with him, this is how his saga began …
A retired Major General from Hove with the moniker Algernon Gove said ‘Before life unravels I must finish my travels.’ And forthwith he made plans to rove.
But it gets worse …
His next plan was to go pony-trekking. He booked something in Wales without checking. It might be quite a chore ? He could get saddle-sore? Oh dear no - there’s a plan that needs wrecking. Our old chap nursed a long-term ambition to explore sites with years of tradition. A castle, he voted, fortified, or deep-moated. He’d find one - he'd make that his mission. Perhaps all his plans were restrictive? He should aim now for something distinctive. Something playful and fun. ‘Cos when all’s said and done to enjoy life should just be instinctive. He knew he’d no taste for long trips that took him o’er oceans in ships. But he’d go in a boat floating nowhere remote - while enjoying some fresh fish and chips.
You can have a playful time on London’s South Bank, and at the London Eye. But it’s more distinctive to discover pastures new – at the evening fair in Gdansk, perhaps.
WP is being very irritating today. It won’t let me centre some of my photos, or alternatively to align all my shots to the left, whatever I try, and however loudly I shout at my laptop. So I have to admit defeat.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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