Archived & Upcoming Images of the Day
2 Fieldmice (Wood Mice) looking to have a little squabble?
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2 Fieldmice (Wood Mice) with exactly the opposite of a squabble in mind?
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The Buzzard is flying over the sprouting Wheat crop (also visible in the background). Perhaps 100 black-headed Gulls can be seen over the fields at many times of day eating either the un-germinated seed or the young plants.
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This looks like a whole sweet Chestnut complete with 'wrapper'. We expect this went into the Squirrels cache as it will keep well for eating in the winter. Squirrels don't hibernate - venturing forth on the warmer winter days and in need of their cache of food.
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A Grey squirrel nibbles the remains from a half-chestnut husk while a Robin keeps a safe distance from the potential swiping claws, awaiting his turn.
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A rather scruffy Buzzard (probably mid-moult) at a typical hunting perch on the 11kV crossbar in some bright afternoon sunshine. Following a few unexpected sightings weeks ago on the actual wires, we have seen no repeats. The buzzards claws and weight suit the wide crossbar better than the wires.
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Lighter birds than Buzzards and with smaller claws prefer to perch on the wires rather than the crossbar. Here one of two Collared Doves is perched on an 11kv cable
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A good year for Comma Butterflies this year at this site if not more generally.
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The Pied Wagtails are back on our roof, hunting the insects warmed under the
slates and emerging for the waiting Wagtails to try to catch. This fly looks
like 'the one that got away'. Each bird and fly are accurately positioned
relative to the roof and each other, but spread out along the
right.
The left hand fly was over the edge of the first frame so we have 'photoshopped'
in a whole fly at the correct place, along with the sky above.
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A Pied Wagtail hurtling down the slates, presumably after an insect we never spotted.
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Magpies in the countryside are really wary of humans - with good reason. So an opportunity for a fly-by montage rarely occurs and this is the first we have included on the web site. Bland sky prevents accurate spacing.
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A short fly-by by a Kestrel. This bland sky is this time featureless cloud preventing accurate spacing
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No, the jackdaw will not try to bite the Kestrel's tail - all their aerial aggression makes use of claws.
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This simple photo of a Wood Pigeon and female Pheasant quite took us by surprise. Surely even female Pheasants are bigger than Wood Pigeons? But a trawl through our ID book suggests that if you ignore the tails the birds size ranges are very similar.
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Just half an hour apart a Tabby Cat and a Fox visited this site in the positions shown. We have always thought of cats as much smaller than a fox, but in this case they are quite similar.
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A Dunnock catches a Cranefly for an afternoon meal.
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As the tea-time rain descended, this little Dunnock just gets on with finding the food distributed an hour or so earlier.
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An adult Buzzard turning away from us on the 'sunny side' with feathers nicely underlit.
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This juvenile Buzzard was flapping as hard as buzzards ever do, and was making very little headway into the steady but strong easterly wind, and losing height at the same time. Birds often drop to near the ground to make progress against strong winds.
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This 'approximate' montage is very close to reality - the wind was blowing all the birds sideways when they tried to fly across it!
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A juvenile Buzzard passing over.
This is a particularly light individual, apparently not particularly unusual.
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For about 20 minutes the local 'Buzzard family' of 2 adults and 2 juveniles circled in the air over the adjoining farmland and our patch.
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This is an accurate montage of flight at about 5 frames per second.
The blurry angled bar top right is an 11kV power cable that both provided the reference
to make an accurate montage :-) and kicked the camera off-focus as it passed through the
centre of the viewfinder :-(
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A hovering Southern Hawker Dragonfly showing us the crazy wing positions it uses to resist the effects of the wind and control it's position.
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After a week or two of absence this Ruddy Darter Dragonfly was out warming itself in the sunshine despite a cold wind. As the summer fades dragonflies make use of any sunshine in their search for a final mating.
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A southern Hawker Dragonfly landed in a woodpile and was quite hard to locate.
Here he is mostly hidden and given us an unusual view of the underbody.
If you have an interest in the underneath of Dragonflies you will find some
moderate quality normal light views as part of our Ultraviolet
survey (over 50 insects over 10 pages).
The insects are not dead - just chilled to calm them, and flew off once warmed up.
In the Section
Index you will also find plants and moths, butterflies, other
insects and (surprise!) moorhen, plus links to technical details of the work and
the paper produced by Wendy Harris on the results of the Dragonfly work of which we
are secondary authors.
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A Grey Squirrel finishing off a fallen Cone, most likely from the overhanging
Lodgepole Pine tree. Nice to see some natural food being chosen.
The awkward crop reflects the bottom right corner of the original frame.
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This Grey squirrel has learned to open Pea pods (which are quite similar, if larger than, many natural wild plants) but apparently has not noticed that one of the delicious seeds (a pea) has already landed on the ground.
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A very intense Sundog (to the left of the sun) broken up into 3 striations by the moving clouds.
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Tawny Owl visits on successive evenings turned out to be different individuals. Here are similar facial views (even if one bird's body is facing us and the other looking sideways) and you can see the very different 'parting' and patterns of grey and brown over the facial disc.
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A Southern Hawker Dragonfly still patrols the main pond at the least show of sunshine. Here he is hovering almost motionless (except for the wings of course) so we have spread the images and not tried to hide the background repeats.
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This image from a flyby shows the wonderfully complex head and thorax.
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A half Corn-on-the-Cob being chewed over by this Squirrel in a very human manner.
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"What's this thing then?"
Our single visiting pheasant gives this piece of cucumber a suspicious look.
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As we came out of the house and moved out of the cover of trees this Buzzard
was perched on the newer of two discarded telephone poles. After a few seconds
the bird spotted the 'dangerous' humans and decided to depart
This montage of the is spread horizontally to includes all of the first 4 frames of flight
at about 7fps but about 50% expanded spacings over natural.
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A couple of seconds into the flight the obscuring trees allowed a decent view of the Buzzard picking up speed. This is accurately montaged at about 7fps.
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A larger view of the first image of the Buzzard in the montage, eye on us and powerful claws on their way to being streamlined behind the bird.
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This Red Kite made a graceful turn in front of us over perhaps 4 seconds. Bird spacings are just for appearance.
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The same bird continued circling, but then made this abrupt aerobraking manoeuvrer to turn in just over 1 second. We never worked out what the 'hurry' was.
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Two Wild Peregrine Falcons perched on adjacent 11kV crossbars about 100m apart. We have seen a Peregrine here once before in 2014, but it was a captive bird (or escapee) still wearing jesses on it's legs. So this is a new wild sighting here for this species.
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This is the more distant of the 2 first sightings of wild Peregrine Falcons. Judging from the relationship with the wires Peregrines are about three-quarters of the height of a Buzzard.
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We just missed the unpredictable launch of the Peregrine Falcon, but caught the
downward dive that disappeared behind the hedge and did not re- appear.
Our report to the Bucks RSPB recorder suggests that there are breeding colonies
around Milton Keynes, and this may be a couple of youngsters spreading out to
find their own territories. Not seen again in the week following this encounter.
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The 'noisy' (forever calling) Buzzard being - err - noisy.
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This bird flew right overhead looking right and left as it went.
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The inner bow of this rainbow showed some extra colours we only rarely see.
Starting outside the sequence seems to be the normal Red, Orange, Yellow,
Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet and then the extras Yellow, Green & Violet.
We have not found an explanation.
Its not a camera effect - we could both SEE some extra colours
and took this short segment in the hope of recording it. We have
not 'wound up' or otherwise changed the colours.
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An unusually bright rainbow on one of those days when the rain is falling in the sunshine! Note how the sky inside the inner bow is always brighter. This was taken a couple of minutes before the detail showing extra colours.
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In the hours after midnight this Tawny Owl touched down for a short visit to the Meadow Post.
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We don't normally show you Rabbits with Myxomatosis even though we see lots of images on our cameras at this time of year. Many recover from less severe attacks, but this one is as bad as it gets. The rabbit is (at least temporarily) blinded by the swellings but alive. It has found this piece of pear to eat at the left end of the log ...
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... but 5 minutes later the Rabbit meets it's end in the jaws of a Fox. We see no signs of it even struggling, and this may be a merciful release for the suffering Rabbit.
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In a patch of sunshine on a cool day this lovely Dragonfly was on the wing for long enough for us to see him land. He is in remarkably good condition for this late in the summer - normally the wing edges will have been torn on a few thorns by now.
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In the autumn sunshine, a Red Admiral Butterfly feasts from the water mint still flowering at the main pond.
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This lovely Little Egret (species common name) flew along the brook, and then unexpectedly turned round and came back a bit closer giving time to get the camera better adjusted. The very out of focus tree top in the middle is a young Lombardy Poplar along the track while lower left and right are huge trees at the brook edge. The spacing are accurate at about 7fps.
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We have not noticed any Starlings around the house in the last few weeks, but 70m away on the 11kV power cables to our north we see a row of juveniles moulting from matt brown to glistening metallic tints, starting on their breasts.
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3 frames of a Harlequin Ladybird crawling over a teasel, open its wing cases for an unusually long time before lift-off. In the bottom right image you can see that the wing case is well lit inside and must be translucent with the spots also clearly visible.
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An unexpectedly tender moment as the male Muntjac Deer (on the left) is quietly
accepted by the female who stands still and looks quietly back at him as he
mounts her just before midnight. These 3 frames over about 5 seconds.
Since we obtained these IR images, BBC Autumnwatch broadcast thermal imagery of
the also small Sika Deer males having to obtain cooperation
and permission from the females before mating. The Muntjac behaviour here may be
similar.
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This male Southern Hawker Dragonfly started hovering long enough to get the camera on him and focus. Here are 3 frames from about 1 second of the hover.
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After 2 years without a sighting, movement in the water turned out to be this immaculate juvenile Grass Snake (about 30cm = 1ft long) swimming over the surface.
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From another frame we caught this moment with tongue out collecting tastes from the air (actually detected when they pull the tongue in - hence the characteristic flicking tongue).
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