Avocets and Godwits in the Northwest

The warm sunny April sunshine continued today as Ian and I arrived at Marshide to photograph avocets and black-tailed godwits. Althought the light was hazy, it was still too bright to shoot anything before mid-afternoon, so we headed off to nearby Martin Mere, a Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve to try for some images of wildfowl chicks. The reserve was already heaving with the public when I arrived but it didn’t really hamper us and after an uncomfortable session of lying on our bellies on the rough concrete paths we had snagged some really nice portraits of both adult birds and their chicks. The sunshine was creating some awesome colour reflections in the water from the verdant greens of the spring leaf on the trees! The first shot of the female goldeneye is straight out of the camera and has only been resized and sharpened for the blog – the colours really were like that!

After a brief period at Martin Mere we headed back to Marshside where we spent the rest of the day trying to capture some of the action and interaction of avocets and godwits but I have to say, it was somewhat quieter than when I was there last week. Far fewer godwits in front of the hide though there were plenty around. The avocets are now sitting on eggs and so again less agression between rival pairs but when it does kick off, its worth the wait! A couple of black-tailed godwits also put on a good show for us briefly and by the end of the session I’d come away with images of around 5 species but with some shots I’m really pleased with.

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Bluebells – a truely British spectacle

April in a British bluebell woodland is just a treat! The woodland floor is carpted with a sea of intense deep blue and the heady scent of thousands upon thousands of bluebells wafts by on the warm spring breeze mixed with a chorus of chaffinch and the newly arrived chiffchaff belting out his incesant song “chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff”. It’s a great time to be out with the camera trying to capture this wonderful scene in a photograph, and always a challenge to get the blues the right shade. This is a scene we all take for granted but I’m sure that of some of these woodlands occured in the USA, they’d be made into national parks!

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Butterbur in the Dales

Ok, so I was another year older today and to comiserate celebrate I headed off to the Dales with the family for lunch at The Angel pub, Hetton. Before we hit the food, we had a short walk around Janet’s Foss near Malham and it was nice to see so many wild flowers blooming in the (very) warm spring sunshine: ramsons, dog violets and bluebells were all beginning to show, but well ahead in terms of flowering was the butterbur. Chiefly a plant of damp verges, the butterbur is an impressive plant with the flower spike showing before the leaves. I only had a snapshot camera with me but here’s an image of a common butterbur spike (Petasites hybridus) surrounded by the leaves of ramsons (or wild garlic).

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Redpolls in York

My friend Ian Newton invited me over to a small woodland near York where he was helping run a feeding station to attract redpolls as part of a study being conducted by a local birder. The niger seed feeders were attracting stacks of coal tits, blue tits and marsh tits, a species we don’t get in my neck of the woods, but they were indeed attracting the target species of redpoll. Today, not only were lesser redpolls arriving at the feeders, but the much bigger mealy redpoll was coming to feed too. Here are a few redpoll shots and I’m sure I’ll be posting the marsh tit shots soon :¬)

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