This weekend I went looking for my old nemesis: the Duke of Burgundy butterfly. It was a stinking hot day and as is usual with the Duke, who adores steeply – sloping sites, I ended up climbing up and down hills in the blazing sun. Although I saw the butterfly twice, I couldn’t get a picture of it. To rub salt into my wounds, I bumped into a young couple with a dog who proudly showed me a stunning picture …
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The Green Hairstreak is a tiny butterfly- the closed wing is little bigger than the nail on my little finger. In a perfect demonstration of the value of doing your homework first, I thought I had seen one some years ago, because the Green Hairstreak is touted as the UK’s only green butterfly, and I’d seen a green butterfly before. This one had a wing the size of the lens on my glasses, so I thought that that was what …
It’s official: it’s not just my imagination. I went hunting today for the duke of burgundy butterfly again. It’s the peak of the flight season and I’m in a place where I’ve seen them before in decent numbers ( and for a butterfly as scarce as the duke, that’s threes and fours, not tens or hundreds. I got a brief glimpse of one. Butterfly numbers are down. The unseasonably mild weather we had earlier in the spring followed by intense …
I was photographing Great Crested Grebes at a local lake today, when I saw a behaviour that is known, but which I’d never seen before : eating feathers. The parent Grebes were taking feathers from their breasts, dipping them into the lake water, then feeding them to their chicks. The current theory is that feathers (which adult Grebes eat as well) help protect the stomach from fish bones and assist in pellet formation, but the evidence is slim and a …
I was in a local bluebell wood the other day, trying to find a new way of showing the beauty of these plants. I failed as usual, simply because they are so stunningly beautiful that it’s hard to find an image that does them justice. I particularly like trying to photograph the occasional Whitebell that crops in the midst of the sea of blue – I suppose because they feel a bit like the plucky underdog. The job was made …
When people talk about destruction of habitat, I immediately think of burning trees in the Amazon, or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. And those things certainly count. But it is a mistake to think of habitat destruction simply on the large scale. In March last year I revisited a site I’ve been to many times, to watch grass snakes emerge. Now I know snakes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, even if they are the harmless Grass Snake, but like …
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