I’ve been running my newly aquired moth trap over the past couple of weeks and I’m catching a few different species, mostly common, small plain moths. This morning, however, I had a great suprise when I opend the trap to find this perfect poplar hawk moth sitting quetly in the corner of the trap. I’ve seen these in the garden before and photographed them too, but not for a long time. I bobbed him on a hosta that I’ve just bought for the garden and took his picture :¬)
Today’s shoot was all about the Emperor Moth, a really special inhabitant of the moorland habitat. Although they occur widely in Yorkshire, we decided to do our emperor moth on the North York Moors as we’d seen a likely spot while out looking for ring ouzels a couple of days ago. We easily found a couple of specimens that were almost pristine and here are the resulting images. No-one could be failed to be impressed by this colourful and spectacular moth!
Today we hit the North York Moors to do a bit of moorland birding in search of ring ouzel. Ring ouzel is a bird I’ve wanted to photograph for years but I’ve never put the effort in and, as it’s now in long term decline, I thought I’d better do something about it. We had several sightings and I managed a few record shots though nothing worth showing. However, I think we have located a couple of areas where they are likely to nest this year and so in a couple of weeks time we will go back and try and do them as they feed the young. In the meantime, here are a few other images from the day
After an unsuccessful trip to see the North Yorkshire eagle owl, we headed over to the coast and spent a couple of hours on a bright, breezy beach photographing Sanderling at South Gare. The beach is quite pleasant though the old industrial back drop is a bit more insulubrious. There were one or two species of waders on the beach but just where the snady area meets the rocky foreshore, there was a small huddle of sanderling roosting on the high tide. They were a bit skittish and didn’t allow too close an approach, but we were able to get close enough to create a few portraits of them on the rocks. Many were really coming into full summer plumage and were really quite different from the slivery white colour of winter.
I’ve just got back from a weekend in the Lake District where we were based at Bowness-on-Windemere, a small town on the edge of England’s largest lake – Lake Windemere. Each day I would visit the small beach area near the main jetty where the tourists boats set off on their trips around the lake. It’s a small shingly beach but it has a good selection of very tame birds including goosander, jackdaw, carrion crow, gulls and other waterfowl. The birds are fed by tourists and have become very habituated so it is very easy to get close to the goosanders in particular, usually a very wary bird. On our arrival on Friday evening we happend to walk past here and there were up to 4 male goosander displaying to females at less than 2m from the bank! The light was dropping but was good enough for shots, but instead of nipping to the hotel and back for the camera, a journey of all of 10 minutes, I decided I do them first thing in the morning when the light would be better. Big mistake! The males never came back to that area though the females were there all the time.
The weather was very mixed with sunshine and heavy snow flurries on and off and a bitingly cold easterly wind. During one visit to the jetty, I was photographing lesser black-backed gulls on the mooring poists when, on removing my eye from the viewfinder, I spotted an Iceland gull perched right in front of me on the nearest post! It must have landed while I was photographing the gulls. Needless to say, I quickly switched my attention to that bird and got some nice images of him in a snow storm. Here are a few images from the trip
