Christmas is over. But let’s give one last shout to the bird beloved of all Christmas card manufacturers and every British bird lover.
For Monday Portrait and Birds of the Week XLV
Monday Portrait & Bird of the Week: Robin
Category: Wildlife
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.
Monday Portrait: Pushy Pigeon
Pigeons of different varieties are apparently found on every continent on earth except Antarctica. I’m not surprised. I’ve yet to visit a country where I’ve seen none. This particular specimen was opportunistically hanging round the outside tables of a a café down at the port in Premià de Mar on Thursday. There were croissant crumbs to be had …
For IJ Khanewala’s Bird of the Week XXXIX
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.
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.
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.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home …
Every winter without fail, ladybirds – any number from about fifteen to forty – come to hibernate in our bedroom in the recess above the bedroom window. I have never taken a photo of them. And since Denzil issued his Nature Photo Challenge #27- Ladybirds – this week, I haven’t seen a single one out and about, so I am resorting to pillaging photos from Unsplash once more.
But Denzil himself suggested that since I’m fond of collective nouns, I should instead share the one for this charming insect. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you – a loveliness of ladybirds. Isn’t that quite – er – lovely?
The featured photo is from Kandis in Glasgow, and the above image is by Malcolm Lightbody. Both can be found on Unsplash.
Our Friend the Crow
Corvids have been given another week to show themselves at Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge. I have no further photos so have resorted to the internet to provide one. Thank you Frank Cone at Pexels.
But I can provide a crow-related story, and one very suited to this challenge for photographers, thanks to a book I have just finished reading
But if they (crows) make fierce enemies, they make even finer allies. A girl in Seattle called Gahi Mann made worldwide news when the crows she had fed every day since she was four years old began to bring her gifts in return: a paper clip, a blue bead, a piece of Lego, a tiny silver heart from a pendant. But even better, her mother Lisa dropped a camera lens cap while out taking photographs in a field. The crows watched nearby. She was almost home before she realised it was lost, but as she came down her garden path, she saw it had been returned to her, balanced precisely on the rim of the bird bath. Camera footage showed a crow arriving with it, walking it on the bird bath, washing it several times over, and laying it out to wait for her return.
Katherine Rundell: The Golden Mole, page 78
This short but perfectly formed book is a hymn to the species which we treasure – or ought to treasure – but may be fast disappearing. From stork to swift to narwhal to hedgehog to seahorse … and fifteen other creatures, Rundell assembles an eclectic mix of fascinating facts to explain why they are special to her, and should be to us. It’s beautifully produced, and evocatively illustrated by Talya Baldwin. Not a natural history book as such, but something that everyone who loves the natural world may want to linger over.
A Conventicle of Corvids
This week’s Nature Photo Challenge from Denzil is to showcase corvids: the crows, ravens, jackdaws, magpies and similar in our lives. I want to showcase as well the collective nouns they’ve all acquired. The ravens in the feature photo seem rather stand off-ish. They are probably extremely miffed at their collective noun: an unkindness of ravens.
I have just one crow for you: I didn’t manage a photo of a murder of crows.
Two jackdaws though. Is that enough to describe them as a clattering of jackdaws?
Then we’re off to Germany to spot a rather odd magpie: is it a magpie? He should be off to join his mates in a conventicle, a tittering, a gulp or a mischief of magpies.
And we’ll end where we started: with a raven, who looks far too dignified to be involved in any unkindness.
By the way. As a child, to help me to distinguish between crows and rooks, I was taught that a crow by itself is in fact a rook. And a crow surrounded by others is – a rook. I hope that’s clear.
Besides Denzil’s challenge, this is also for I. J. Khanewala’s Bird of the Week. Quite a few different birds here, but all are corvids, so I may get away with it … again.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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