Today is my wife’s wedding anniversary 🙂 and she has a bit of a penchant for white storks. I think it is a Central European obsession. Anyway, she said we should go visit the white storks at the recently rewilded 1416 hectare Knepp Estate in West Sussex. So I packed my little Lumix DMC-GX7 camera…
Took some more time out to grab some more snaps of the bumblebees working the lavender today. Like the snaps I took yesterday, I used my “gardening lens” – a rather battered 90mm f/2.5 Tamron prime macro between f/8 and f/11, attached to my Lumix DMC GX7 µ4/3 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. Weird as it…
Lots of bumblebees again this year. Sadly not seen many red tailed ones (bombus lapidarius) But there are a heck of a lot of white tailed bumblebees (bombus lucorum). I’ve already taken quite a few snaps of them in previous years. As ever they are going crazy over our lavender bushes. They cannot get enough…
I was pleased to note that our collared doves have returned after several year’s absence. Of course I have no way of knowing if they are the same collared doves. But whoever they are, I’m rather fond of them and delighted to see them back in the garden again.
Here on the central south coast of England, it is rare for temperatures to drop much below freezing. This cold snap we recorded -4.5 °C at night and barely rising above 0°C during the day. And thanks to economies we’re making due to the ridiculously high price of natural gas, the house itself seldom rose…
Some readers may remember that during lockdown, I wrote an article concerning the large stag beetle grubs I discovered round the back of my shed? Well, it seems the stag beetle grubs have grown up now – well some of them have anyway. I discovered quite a few adults in our garden lately. Yesterday, I…
It was a lazy Bank Holiday Monday morning and we had just crawled out of bed, when we heard a bit of a splash outside. We opened the curtains and noticed the water in the pond was moving, But we didn’t know why. Fortunately Zoneminder captured the incident from one of our security cameras. So…
Following on from my post about Szofi and Macus, seems people all over Europe are cheering for them. They’ve become storky superstars! 🙂 Meantime back here in old Blighty, storks’ 360,000 year archaeological relationship with Britain came to an end several centuries ago, when it seems they were hunted to extinction. However, there currently three sites…
My wife is Hungarian. Like many folks in central Europe, Hungarians have a particular affinity for white storks. Even during the soviet era, lampposts often had huge plinths welded to the top, so that these massive wild birds can build their nests. Throughout the various COVID lock-downs my wife started following various European stork nests…
Well, the weather has perked up a bit, But we can’t actually go out and do very much because of coronavirus lockdown. So I thought Id take a few springtime snaps around the old homestead.
I decided to a bit of work in the garden yesterday afternoon. As I was clearing away some of the dead wood from some old tree stumps round the back of my shed, I came across these wee beasties. They were massive. Unfortunately they were a tad camera-shy, but before they curled up, they were…
It’s a beautiful spring day here in south east Hampshire. And it’s dead quiet thanks to the Coronavirus lockdown. And the northern sky that normally liberally criss-crossed with vapour trails is a perfect clear sky blue, with no aircraft within 50 km or more.
So here we are, first day of national lockdown here in the UK. How are things in your part of the world? Round here (South East Hampshire) things seem eerily quiet this morning. Our street is a sleepy little cul-de-sac and pretty quiet even at busy times. But we are 300 metres from the main…
Left: complete installation including toilet, cistern, isolating valve hose, mounting bracket and the shattaf itself. Right: Close-up of shattaf. It is quite small, measuring approximately 11 cm long and about 6 cm front-to-back. As the coronavirus crisis deepens, seems we also have the deeply undignified spectacle of fully grown adults publicly fighting each other as…
This morning I heard a strange commotion outside the studio window, From the corner of my eye, I could see that the transparent bird feeder appeared to be moving on its own. On close inspection I discovered that the incredibly boisterous and greedy young starlings we have round here had smashed the lid off the…
A strange cloud formation in the northern sky round the back of our house.
Drunken bumblebees working the lavender in our garden. Seems Bumblebees have longer tongues than ordinary worker bees and can reach to the bottom of the lavender flowers in order to get to the nectar. Moreover nectar can ferment, when mixed with rainfall and natural yeast. Consequently these incredible little creatures can become quite tipsy, especially…
Today I had to spread some nematodes around our recently planted Portuguese laurel trees. But before I put the nematodes in water, I thought it would be fun to look at them under the microscope, and possibly take some photos with my recently acquired 23.3mm eyepiece to µ4/3 camera adaptor. The camera is my little…
I have always been rather fascinated by the fractal-like properties of the romanesco. It really does look like it is not of this planet. SO I thought it would be fun to team up a romanesco, some cheap RGB LED lighting and a couple of broken silver coloured mannequins. Just in case anyone is wondering:…
For some time now, this little fellow has frequented our garden. We have a sort of hedgehog highway behind the shed. And because we have no cats or dogs, they hedgehogs are free to pretty much come and go as they please.
2013-09-08 we had a family outing to the Weald and Downland living museum, Sussex, England. In addition to being a very interesting place to take a camera, it is also home to a gaggle of particularly photogenic white Embden geese (bottom of page 2 and top of page 3 in the gallery below). Having a…
Another walk across Southampton Common, camera in hand
Just taken the MX5 for a little spin across the New Forest. Naturally, we made plenty of stops for photos.
Garden looks unusually pretty this year. Especially considering I have no gardening skills or inclination whatsoever. But I do quite enjoy taking photos.
Today we took a road trip to the Otter Sanctuary near Longdown in the New Forest.
