Category: Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal

Eight Monday Portraits of Eight Tiny Birds

Mondays at the moment are when I help some of the Wildlife Team here at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal as we check nestboxes round and about the estate. I’m very much a junior member of the team – lots to learn. The questions change as the season progresses. Which boxes are occupied? (by no means all). Which boxes have meticulously constructed nests within – different species, different nesting styles? Which ones have eggs? How many? Covered or uncovered? Cold? Meaning more will be laid. Or warm? Meaning they are about to be incubated. Is there an adult sitting on said eggs? And now – increasingly – have they hatched? Are the absent parents out and about frantically securing food for those ever-open mouths. Which nests – partly finished or fully constructed have been deserted?

The first photo is of nuthatch hatchlings, maybe four days old, courtesy of Colin, a fellow volunteer. My – slightly fuzzier -photo is of some even younger blue tits.

It’s a tough year. It’s been cold, and insects and caterpillars simply aren’t about. Food is hard to come by. Eggs are abandoned, hatchlings starve. Today wasn’t as bad as we feared, and we were glad to see so many boxes with eggs yet to hatch, just as – finally – the temperatures are promised to rise this week.

For Monday Portrait.

I did rather wonder why not a single soul had either ‘liked’ or commented on this post. It turned out to be simple. I hadn’t pressed ‘publish’ after I had written it …

Dawn. Worth Getting Up For?

You’re  not crawling out of bed at 3.30 because you’ve got an early shift at work.  You’re not getting up at silly o’clock because you’ve got to go through the whole dismal business of airport security and a flight before beginning your holiday.  No.  You’re getting up because you want to.  You can even largely skip getting washed, let alone finding presentable clothing.

That was me, last week.

3.45: I crept out of the house before it was even light, not waking anyone else up. In the car, on the way to Studley, the full moon shone cold white in an charcoal sky. The first glimmer of light – a sort of navy-with-apricot-ish coral stole across the horizon. Rabbits loped along the verges.  A barn owl rose silently from the road ahead, clasping its prey.

About 4.05: At Studley, those rich salmon sky-tones were flaring brighter now. A blackbird sang.  Just the one. Within minutes, he was joined by others.  Then robins, song thrushes. After that, wrens, bluetits, then blackcaps, chaffinches, chiffchaffs and nuthatches.  Even a curlew.  Even a tawny owl.  Not that I’d have known all this if it hadn’t been for Merlin.

I walked towards the trees, not yet quite in leaf, silhouetted against  the brightening sky.  Deer, more curious than startled, came to gaze at me before resuming grazing, or sometimes deciding that fleeing silently away together was a better option.

Gillet Hill gave views of Ripon and beyond, the now magenta sky beginning to halo the cathedral. But maybe the view from St. Mary’s would be even better?  The deer thought so.

The church was a fine sight in its own right, but haze now hid the cathedral, and down the hill I went to catch, at 5.20 (not 5.35, as advertised), the sun rising over the horizon.  I watched it climb – rather quickly, rather dramatically actually.

Then the early morning chill (1 degree ….)  finally got to me, and I elected for the warmth of the car home, then a hot shower, cosy clothes, and – just a bit later, breakfast, fresh-brewed coffee, and the chance to share news of my adventures.

Wasn’t all that worth getting up for?

The correct answer is ‘Yes’.

For Jo’s Monday Walk

Too Late to Take a Seat

A slightly enigmatic shot taken while clearing the Cellarium at Fountain’s Abbey after a concert.

And that’s it. Becky’s NovemberShadows are over. It’s been fun, at least for the participants, and I’ve ‘met’ new bloggers in almost every continent. Thanks, Becky, for being Queen of Squares.

For Becky’s NovemberShadows. And. Dead cheeky here. Jude’s Bench Challenge. Those first three. They look like a bench? Just … maybe?

Autumn Shadows at Studley Royal

Shadows fall below this venerable sweet chestnut tree.

To begin a month of Shadows for Becky’s Month of Squares, I bring you a photo from Studley Royal, where the rutting stags vie for attention with the autumn colours.

Probably too young to join in the rut, this stag poses against dappled shadow.

Thank Becky, for being Queen of Squares once more.

Breakfast Time for a Heron

Walking through the orchard at Fountains Abbey early yesterday, I came upon this heron, not 10 feet away. He was unconcerned about me, and spent his time alert for a breakfast meal. He found three courses during the time I watched him – about 20 minutes. This video shows him enjoying just one of them.

A heron out hunting along the river bank for breakfast.

It’s my last (and first) video of the month. My last shot of the month is also one of the heron, and is my featured photo. I was quite fed up that I only had my bargain-basement phone with me, rather than my camera. Never mind.

For Brian’s Last on the Card

… and IJK’s Bird of the Week.

A Quiet Bench

Near Fountains Hall, the early Jacobean house in the grounds of Fountains Abbey, a new garden has recently been opened. The Quiet Garden. It is indeed a peaceful haven. My favourite feature is this bench, made from the wood of now-fallen trees in Studley Royal’s deer park.

And in case you’ve not seen it before, here is Fountains Hall.

For Jude’s Bench Challenge.

A Morning with the Deer of Studley Royal

This wasn’t the post I intended to make. But an accident turned into an opportunity..

Yesterday morning saw me with a friend, completing our tour of duty as volunteer Roaming Rangers in the Deer Park at Studley Royal. This involves doing a low-key census of the deer, looking out for noteworthy wildlife, answering questions from the public, and occasionally asking dog-owners to put their pets on a short lead, especially now, when female deer are busy giving birth. And I took my camera. Accidentally, I left it on black and white setting. But I find I don’t mind. I’ll share some of my images with you.

The featured photo shows the first scene we saw: red deer stags all sitting resting beneath the trees. This is their languid time of year, when they eat and rest, building up their strength for the autumn rut.

And here’s a stag; a young calf; and a hind with her calf.

We’re just about to change terminology, because we’re leaving red deer behind, and joining the fallow deer. The male is a buck, the female is a doe, and the youngster a fawn.

As we spotted fallow deer ahead of us, we all but walked into the youngest of young fawns, left sleeping by its mum far too near an – admittedly little-used – path. I snatched this photo, but we hurried away, not wanting to cause distress to the little creature’s mother.

Then we had a wonderful twenty minutes or so, staring across a deep dry valley much loved by the deer because of its relative inaccessibility, and watching a young fawn gambolling through the long grass, dashing back from time to time to see its mum.

And here are two typical does: one looks ‘normal’, but the white one is too. She’s not albino, but leucistic: she has reduced pigentation in her coat: it’s a pretty common variation – as is melanistic, where the opposite is true, and over-production of melanin leads to a black coat.

But I’ll leave you with a further set of silhouettes from those utterly relaxed stags.

For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness …

… and Jo’s Monday Walk

Spring in Glorious Technicolor – or Muted Monochrome

Even though over the last few days the weather has reverted to winter chill with a vengeance, I think it’s definitely the week that Spring has Sprung. The daffodils have suddenly burst forth into golden glory. The grass is lusher. Dandelion and daisies crowd the verges. Spring announces itself in an explosion of colour, in contast to the muted browns and greys of winter with its dull skies and overabundance of mud.

So is there even any point in ‘doing’ spring in monochrome? I thought I’d find out, and chose four images where it’s not just spring flowers telling the story, because they’re complementing the buildings they grow near.

Perhaps these aren’t part of the story, because snowdrops show their faces from early January. But they’re white, so may not suffer so much in monochrome.
Primulas on a traffic island near York Minster.
Tulips overlooking Knaresborough Viaduct.

Part of my own difficulty is that I don’t enjoy tinkering with photos. What comes out of the camera either works, or it doesn’t, and then I’ll junk it. At most I’ll level the picture up, maybe lightly crop it, even – slightly – fiddle with brightness. So my translations into monochrome are crude at best. If I want monochrome – and I’m increasingly choosing it over colour – I’ll shoot in black and white. And perhaps follow up with a further version in colour. I admire those photographers who use editing tools with discretion, so what we see is the original shot – just enhanced in subtle ways. I’m less keen on dramatic editing. But in a diary that is already over-full, I guess I don’t feel like giving this particular skill the time it needs to learn to do it well.

I’ll finish with Fountains Abbey as it is now, its grounds carpeted in daffodils. Black and white as my featured photo, and – my much preferred version here – in the above-mentioned Glorious Technicolor.

For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness