Archived & Upcoming Images of the Day
Surprise pic of the year so far was this Sparrowhawk taken by the kitchen window camera. The first image was of landing with back to camera, and this second of the bird preening. It is facing away from us bending back with the beak in the base of it's tail.
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This un-fudged detail of the head shows what we call the 'mad yellow eye', unusually with iris fully open in the poor light
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After the awful Spring the white variant emerged about 2 weeks later than usual, but this 'Pink' wild rose (the root stock of a cultivar) arrived around it's usual time of year
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The pink wild rose is the root stock of a cultivar of this pretty yellow rose which unfortunately bleaches to white almost as soon as it is open.
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Green Alkanet is very attractive to many insects. This is a largish Bumble-bee on a flower, but there isn't enough body detail for us to make a positive ID.
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Green Alkanet is very attractive to many insects. This is an atypically small species of Bumble-bee without a common name, here caught hovering at a flower.
) hovering at green alkanet flower (crop)(r+mb id@768).jpg)
This vivid beetle on a grass stem is probably Pyrochroa
Serraticornis. Some identification books also name this as the
'Cardinal Beetle' while other books name a similar (but
different) species as such.
The Antenna near us is foreshortened to a black circle but there
is nothing 'wrong' with it as we can see in other less
satisfying images.
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This young fox makes several appearances each week at the moment and is here caught in a strange posture which reminds us of a soft toy left by a child.
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We see a fox most nights at the Infra-Red (IR) stealth cameras. Here one kept still enough during the exposure to make a decent photo.
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These white wild rose flowers smell divine even as you walk down the other side of the hedge! We have a mixture of 'bought' wild rose, and root stocks of cultivars not controlled by pruning. The pink varieties have far less aroma.
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Tree Sparrows breed here though we don't know where this year. Here a youngster is demanding and receiving peanut fragments, and picking up a few grains on its own while the parent was hammering away to get out the next beakful!
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This female chaffinch shows a healing injury near the base of the right wing, but we love the spread of the wings and the translucent shadows.
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Green Alkanet is a magnet for what bees there are. This bumble-bee spent at least several minutes crawling around the flowers. We didn't notice a second visitor until we processed the image - some sort of fly on the lower left flower.
) & unident fly on green alkanet flower (crop)(r+mb id@768).jpg)
A pair of Large Red Damselflies are laying eggs in the main pond. The female (lower) is ovipositing on the pond lily leaf below the water surface, as you can see from the floating duckweed.
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A pair of Azure Damselflies laying eggs in the main pond. The female (lower) is ovipositing on a fallen stem below the water surface, as you can see from the floating duckweed.
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The Bluetits spend quite a while some days looking for insects on the vegetation around the main pond to take back to the nestlings. The Flag Iris is flowering for its few days extravaganza, and encourages the tits out where we can photograph them.
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A Tree Sparrow enjoying a good shake-out
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A female Great spotted Woodpecker enjoying the easy feed of peanut butter.
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Eye-eye
A male Great Spotted Woodpecker on the perch outside the kitchen
window.
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Each year (so far) the 'Tawny owl' box is used by Jackdaws. For a while in Spring this box was regularly fought over by 4 jackdaws, sometimes all in the box at once banging about and screaming at each other. 1 pair won the war and made a nest to raise these 2 beautiful youngsters.
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This first sighting of the year of a female Large Red Damselfly found her in this curved position. It always amazed us now much the joints on the abdomen can bend while the whole body looks so rigid when straight.
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We had never noticed Walnut tree flowers until prompted by a local farmer. Single trees have both female flowers and male catkins, but in separate clusters. This is a cluster of male catkins we only found on a tall tree about 4 metres above the ground.
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This is a close-up of the tiny female flower - only a bit over eye height this time. We are not surprised we have missed the whole affair.
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A buzzard made a lazy flight over the house where we caught this backlit moment with head turned as if a classic eagle! The nick in the birds right wing identifies it as a 'regular'.
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The Rook on the left spent 5 minutes harassing this unbelievably tatty buzzard with no tail to mention and whole groups of flight feathers damaged or missing. But it is an old and experienced bird - it knew to take almost no notice of the noisy & aggressive Rook.
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Some sort of Cuckoo Bee (one that lays in the nest of other bumble bee nests) was enjoying feeding on a Bluebell (or some sort of hybrid).
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A Better view of the abdomen to help with the ID for the Cuckoo Bee.
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This Magpie is undoubtedly collecting twigs to build up the nest. But flying with this awkward shaped twig must be a bit weird, and even harder to build into a nest.
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The flying male Chaffinch's claws are curled so we think that this is a greeting to the female on the ground rather than a threat.
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A fieldmouse (wood mouse) in the dark near midnight may have had some moonlight with which to survey the surroundings.
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We have perhaps 15 of these evergreen 'Lodgepole Pine' trees now mostly about 8 metres tall. This is a general view up the tree from near the base.
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A detail showing
 + male (bottom right) + cone (bottom left) (crop)(r+mb id@768).jpg)
The Lodgepole Pine trees produce copious quantities of a quite coarse pollen at the slightest touch or pulse of wind.
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To catch the pollen is the flower - here in some detail. Pine trees are full of resin you see leaking at the left which makes the wood unexpectedly flammable (or inflammable if you prefer - same meaning).
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As an upcoming badger cull 'experiment' starts in some of the UK all we can hope is that nobody sets their sites on our area (not know to harbour TB). Anyway, we see badgers on the Infra-Red (IR) cameras most nights - here is one photographed about 5 seconds apart - and hope this continues.
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This unusually chaotic sky made of Cirrus ice clouds was the harbinger of a patch of bad weather.
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Accurate montage (at about 7 fps) of a little Egret Flying past.
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A slightly horizontally stretched montage (at about 7 fps) of a little Egret Flying past.
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The number of birds in pursuit reduces as the action moves away from the rookery.
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One rook is now continuing the attack - this montage photographed at about 5 fps - this montage spans about half a second.
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Finally free of pursuit, we get a better view of what looks like a young rabbit in the claws. 800 metres on we had a hazy view of a similar mobbing as it arrived over another rookery.
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Elegant Jay landing on the tree-stump.
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3 minutes earlier the Jay was checking out the ground level site. When we first saw this image we thought something was shading the back of the bird. Closer inspection of this and other images shows that Jay plumage really does have a front and back discontinuity that probably breaks up the outline in foliage.
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"Stop fiddling around preening and FEED ME!"
There was a family group of 4 rooks on the edge of the farm track
(about 100 metres away from the camera) from where we could clearly
hear the youngster demanding the next beakful.
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Blossom of one of our multi-decade old apple trees.
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A Horse chestnut 'candle' of flowers at about head height.
This is our 9th try at taking a sequence of bud through to conker of
a single candle
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For a while a common visitor, the Yellowhammer is now a once-a week photo or sighting. You really can't miss the glow of yellow when a male flies by (the females are not so brilliant)
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No idea what is going on here - a un-fudged single frame of one fieldmouse (wood mouse) in a vertical leap over another on the ground.
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