Wildlife – Page 4 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

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.

Wild(ish) life in the city

Our day in Newcastle earlier this week wasn’t just about people-watching. We’d come to walk the banks of the Tyne, weaving back and forth over at least some of its seven bridges. Let’s take a bird’s eye view of the scenes we saw.

This is what those pigeons in the header photo were looking for.

This is the Tyne Bridge, with just beyond, the Sage Gateshead and the Baltic Centre.

This young herring gull was inspecting me as I inspected him. He was tucked behind a railing just beyond that first planter.

We wandered onto the Swing Bridge, which luckily didn’t want to open to allow river traffic through. Its elderly wooden jetties provided the perfect resting place for gangs of pigeons.

Then we walked down this walkway, for another view of the Millennium Bridge …

… but one of our views of the Sage was reflected in a nearby office window.

We didn’t really see any more wildlife. Unless this counts.

I’ll see if I’m allowed to sneak both the pigeons and the herring gull into I. J. Khanewala’s Bird of the Week.

‘Everybody loves to fly: but no one loves the fly’*

It’s true. Flies on the chopping board? Swat it now. Fruit flies crawling over the fruit bowl? Sluice them under the tap. Horse flies? Aaagh.

And yet we need them, those flies. Their larvae clean up after us – all that poo, all those dead bodies. The adults pollinate for us. They’re part of the cycle of life that we depend on.

I have not a single photo. Not one. So I’ve gone to Unsplash, a free-to-use stock photo site that I use a lot and recommend to you. Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge is meant to be an opportunity for us to showcase our own images. But this time, I’ll showcase the works of others. They really make the case for a fly being a thing of beauty, as well as of use.

The photographers haven’t named their flies, so I’ve had to try. Corrections welcomed. We’ll start with the house fly:

Tobias Roth. The featured photo, also of a house fly, is by a Spaniard, Josep Plans.

Next, a sarcophaga, a flesh fly. I guess the clue is in the name.

And finally, a green bottle fly.

Pall Maroof

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.

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.

The Rat & Me

I’m - fairly - intelligent. Just like a rat.
Empathetic. Just like a rat.
I laugh when I’m tickled.  Just like a rat.
I need companionship. Just like a rat.
And I’m - usually - clean.  Just like a rat.
So why don’t I want to be … just like a rat?

For Rebecca at Fake Flamenco’s July 2023 Poetry Challenge.

My header image comes from Slyfox Photography at Unsplash, and my second, also from Unsplash, from Dave Alexander. Oddly, I have not a single image of a rat in my photo archive.

‘The busy bee has no time for sorrow’

The quotation that forms my title is by William Blake. I have no idea whether it’s true that bees have no time for sorrow, but it’s certainly the case that bees are busy. Yesterday, and unforgivably without even my phone as a camera, we saw – or rather heard at first – a brightly yellow hypericum thronged with bees, buzzing energetically, and hurrying round each flower, their pollen sacs already bulging bright and yellow. This YouTube video tells a similar tale:

My own photos come from a friend’s sunflowers …

… and from elsewhere in her garden, as a bee apparently all but drowns in pollen.

For Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #17: Bees

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