Archived & Upcoming Images of the Day
The male chaffinch on the tree stump is not going to let that pesky robin come and have any of the pile of food bigger than he is!
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Lightning romance in the Fieldmouse (Wood Mouse) world!
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Whee!
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That was yummy! Foxes visiting this sites always try to get the last little bit of peanut butter out of the hole in the log.
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SIT!
Some Hopes! This image was taken after the fox had licked out
the hole in the log, and it settled down to see what it could find.
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Despite air temperatures reaching only about 18C the Hawker dragonflies are still about whenever the sun comes out. This is a male Migrant Hawker hanging from a bramble stem to warm up in the sun.
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A side view of the same Migrant Hawker Dragonfly
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A couple of Hobbies still have not migrated yet (middle day of September) and are still harassing the local buzzards. Here is one of them really getting a reaction from the buzzard. View as 4 pairs of birds top to bottom at about 7 fps - this is half a second of action.
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Hawker dragonflies need to warm themselves in the sunshine to fly in lower air temperatures. You have to see them land to spot them as they align themselves with the stems
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Hawker dragonflies are very territorial. This is the same insect as above (judging from the wing damage) next day patrolling over the pond. The image has been rearranged and the spacings slightly stretched to illustrate the almost hover.
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This year we have had a lovely and atypical show of 10 or 20 at once of Red Admiral butterflies. We normally see them on our Yellow Buddleia, but this one was basking on a River Birch tree (Betula nigra) which is apparently a USA native. Anyway, we were taken by the colour contrasts.
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We are convinced this whisker mingling is the Fieldmouse (Wood Mouse) equivalent of a snog!
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A little sweetie fieldmouse (wood mouse)
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Another sweetie fieldmouse (wood mouse), undoubtedly on the lookout for danger.
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There are far fewer of these Speckled Wood Butterflies this year than usual, but this one provided a couple of separate in-flight portraits we decided to show as a single image.
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Out on a warm evening with the flash camera found a few dozen insects on our trusty yellow buddleia. This is a cranefly - we have no way being sure which of 290 or so British species it might be - our best guess is Tipula Maxima as being big with similar markings!
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Not the more common Hebrew Character moth, but the 'Setaceous' (means 'hairy') variant on a yellow Buddleia.
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Lacewings are very commonly seen in the daytime as well as here in the dark on Buddleia.
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Lacewings are very commonly seen in the daytime as well as here in the dark on Buddleia. This detail of the eye is fascinating. The orange oval definitely belongs to the insect (also known as Golden-Eyes). The circle of green blobs is most likely reflections of the foliage from the eye.
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A Comma Butterfly feeding on a Yellow Buddleia. This shows the lower surface of the wing with the 'comma' marking, rather than the orange upper surface.
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The Tawny owl made a visit at the end of our day. It unusually flew from the kitchen perch via somewhere we don't have an IR CCTV camera, then onto the meadow post where there it was too dark to get more than 'ID' images.
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What does Fieldmouse (Wood Mouse) do with a slug in the way?
Walk on it.
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"Moustache"?
2 Leopard slugs end-to-end and a fieldmouse (wood mouse) behind them created
this fun juxtaposition in this chance single frame.
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This 'stealth' camera caught 12 frames over 4 minutes of these two foxes having what we can only describe as a 'energetic' romp between bouts of feeding. The pair on the right is the first frame we got, that on the left 4 minutes later is the clearest we have of some sort of trial of strength side by side head to tail pushing at each other. Teenagers (fox equivalent)!
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While the neighbouring farm harvested the wheat crop at least 6 buzzards,
a male kestrel and 2 Hobbies turned up to take advantage of the disturbance.
The buzzards found catching displaced rodents very easy.
Here one has caught one in its talons, along with quite a bit of straw.
First get rid of the straw (right then left) ...
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... and then eat it in flight.
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This micro-moth about 10mm long (wingspan about 20mm =0.8 inch) was feeding on the pond edge Water mint.
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"Who do you think you are staring at."
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This year two regularly visiting foxes have been eating most of the
meagre crop of apple windfalls. Here one goes 'down the hatch' in 5 minutes.
(The apple on the right was there in both original frames)
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After several looks over the site a couple of hours earlier, the fox runs through the site possibly chasing some prey.
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The Polecat has reappeared in 4 separate events in a week (2 at this site and 2 at a 'stealth' camera.')
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A bit of sunshine on not too-cold days bring the dragonflies out - mostly on feeding hunts over the long grass.
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A bit of sunshine on not too-cold days bring the dragonflies out - mostly on feeding hunts over the long grass.
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The 2 pigeons in a ivy covered Lilac bush are doing well - these two fledged the next evening. There are probably many other pairs we know nothing about.
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This lovely Tawny Owl stayed for 20 minutes (on CCTV recording) but blocked the beam so took no more photos.
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A different crop from the same frame - more drama but less owl!
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This heron was photographed through the kitchen window. Takeoff was more nearly vertical than appears in this stretched montage.
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A common Footman Moth with eyes glowing in the camera flash. Up and down doesn't seem to mean much to many small insects.
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This Lesser Broad-Bordered Yellow Underwing is a new moth for us - it will have a bright underwing that flashes in flight, but we never got to see it
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Female Southern hawker dragonflies don't systematically patrol ponds like the males do, but hunt around the hedges and rank grass. Here she is hung up on a dead stem.
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This female Southern Hawker dragonfly was flying into a strong wind allowing an unusual 3 images in succession to be in reasonable focus. You can see from the difficulty of seeing the wings against complex background the reason we use a simple 'blue sky' background in the indoor 'flight tunnel'
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A single male kestrel frequents the surrounding wheat crop where he seems to find rodents quite easily. Here he is pulling apart his latest catch to eat it.
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2 Hobbies took it turns to see off a much larger buzzard over a couple of
minutes.
Here one of the Hobbies made a Swoop at the Buzzard, who defecated
(standard practice for bird about to take off or maneuver) which are
the blobs in the left to right 3 frame montage. Vertical positions are
accurate but the montaged images are spread left to right.
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2 Hobbies took it turns to see off a much larger buzzard over a couple of
minutes.
A head on view of one of the attacks.
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2 Hobbies took it turns to see off a much larger buzzard over a couple of
minutes.
The best (from the photographers point of view of position and
lighting) was this sweep with claws extended as the Buzzard
veered away. Read this montage top to bottom with arbitrary positions
of accurate pairs of birds
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Caught in the act!
PROOF (well 'confirmatory evidence') that it's the fox taking the apples.
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We have always enjoyed clouds (and get a nearly full sky to view them) but we have started looking more intently for 'clouds that look like things'. To us this look like the head of the giant bird, beak to left complete with eye and long neck.
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Sundogs are coloured patches in certain types of clouds, left and right of the sun. Here the sun is on the left, Sundog on the right. We don't know which of the other patches are atmospheric or camera optics effects.
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At site 2 this is one fox visiting for 3 hours, or maybe repeatedly returning.
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A few days later we think this is the same fox very intent on something not visible from the viewpoint of the camera.
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