Archived & Upcoming Images of the Day
A Grey Squirrel chasing away Wood Pigeon at the Meadow site.
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A Grey Squirrel chasing away a Dunnock at the Meadow site.
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What Me? Go chasing after innocent birds?
This is most likely another individual at this site some 40m away.
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Very strong winds have brought down hundred of twigs, a dozen branches, and a few whole trees. This twig in front of the main pond saves this Grey Squirrel all that climbing about to reach the Willow buds to eat - even if 'inexplicably on the ground'. We doubt that the Squirrel even thinks about it - edible so eat it.
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This male Reeves' Muntjac Deer provides a clear view of the start of
the emergence of his bony antlers from within their velvet.
The antlers are 'bone-like' rather than actual bone.
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Muntjac Reeves Deer eyes are larger than you expect from the body size.
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The Bee-flies have started to emerge - a sure sign of Spring. They have nothing to do with Bees except for the general appearance. This one hovered over the leaf before finally landing
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Next day from dozens of failures and 'not so good' pics in flight, we selected this one as the best we have of this Bee-fly in flight.
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One or more Sparrowhawks pass windows several times on most days, but pass far too quickly to determine the sex, and no cameras are triggered by their passage. But here a male Sparrowhawk stops on the Kitchen perch triggering this image. The female is now most probably spending most of her time keeping eggs warm - we have absolutely no idea where any nest is hiding.
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This male Sparrowhawk most likely landed on the Right hand side of the perch (avoiding the IR sense beam over the left) so only gets photographed as he takes off through the sense beam.
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We have a soft spot for pairs of Robins for the short time they tolerate each other for the breeding season. These two are chatting by the water-cooler standing by the sunken water bowl at the Meadow site.
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Outside the front of the house is a long ago pollarded (and unfortunately dead) ornamental
Cherry tree inherited with the house right on the edge of the concrete track
subsequently laid by the farmer we bought the 2 acres from.
Unfortunately it started to grow over the access track and we had to try to reduce
the overgrowth. But it died, and now provides a convenient perch for mostly
Pigeons, but here this Robin.
The Robin is looking down at their mate ...
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... who was picking up a scatter of corn from the concrete track.
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Perhaps 5 metres away across the pond on the island we see this beautiful single Periwinkle flower glowing in the sunshine. The asymmetric petal shape exactly matches the description from our venerable copy of Keeble Martin's 'Concise British Flora' published 1965. In a world of endless change its lovely to find something stable!
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Cherry trees have produced amazingly good blossom this year. We find this blossom beautiful 'en-masse' and exquisite at close range.
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Very few Rooks are now carrying sticks to their nests, but beakfuls of 'lining' are occasionally brought to their nests. Here a bird arrives with a beakful of leaves, stops for a moment in a nearby treetop near a bird already there, before flying to the nest while obscured by trees.
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These 2 pics with date stamps only 1 minute apart seem to be making a major effort to add leaves to their dray - the previous night was freezing. These 2 pics are timestamped as consecutive minutes, but maybe up to almost 2 minutes apart.
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Here one we didn't expect and will be lucky ever to see again - a pair of Buzzards
mating in a hedge top perhaps 150m away. The human eyes saw, but the
camera missed, the 'mounting'
but caught several seconds of mating. Bottom right the male lifts off from
the females back.
We kept all the frames from this 10fps sequence - if anyone would find
them useful just ask.
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A Buzzard at tenth of a second intervals but simply placed end-to-end. Without any static reference accurate positioning is impossible
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Here is one we don't see very often - a Long-tail Tit collecting feathers for
the nest. According to Wikipedia Long-tail nests contains about 1500 feathers,
sometimes perhaps twice this.
When we next find an old LTT nest we are NOT going to count!
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Just a bit more wood for the Rook's nest
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Ah - this is the life - sitting in the bath with a good view all round to feel safe.
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Nonchalance personified - even to resting the tip of the tail on the flat surface.
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This female Mallard Duck spent at least 20 minutes quietly floating on the Round Pond. From about 40 successive frames we found this one with the reflection of the head not too broken up by the ripples.
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The female Mallard Duck on Round Pond is disturbed again, and this time swims away in ripples of water among the just started marginal vegetation.
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A portrait of one of the adult Badgers searching the path near the east hedge gap.
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There are nightly sighting of Badgers - here we pick one that is reasonably sharp.
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Outside the living room hedge is a not very vigorous hedge (shaded for most of the day) where we are now seeing both male (here) and female Blackbirds perching on the top.
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Much of the Living Room 'picture' window had become smothered in impact marks that match the multiple attacks the male Blackbird has made on his reflection in the window when the room is unlit. Here is the most noticeable patch, focusing on the window pane and contrast enhanced to highlight the marks
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This male Blackbird has his beak crammed full of dried leaves to take to the nest somewhere else in his territory.
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When the Duck Pond was full of Great Crested Newts and frogs, Herons were regular Spring visitors to catch them. But all Newts, Frogs and Toads have vanished and we only get to see Herons in flight overhead.
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Correctly positioned at 10 fps as the bird was blown sideways by a strong wind
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A very rare sighting here - a Goshawk in flight over the site.
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Lower left we have a Hare being watched suspiciously by the Reeves' Muntjac Deer on the other side of the ditch at the south hedge gap
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The young male Deer concluded that it was safe, and made his way across the currently just rather muddy ditch.
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This is the long-term male Reeves' Muntjac Deer visitor that broke his left antler soon after growing it.
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Approaching the blocked gate provides a glimpse of 'something' between the rails of the farm railings. Adjusting the height of the camera obtains this little portrait of two Grey Partridges.
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Our movement through the gate was too much for them and they flew off.
The camera picked them up again some 150 metres away flying along
the distant hedge.
This montage is a bit of a fiddle from 4 frames with 2 birds in each
(do the arithmetic!) but each bird is accurately spaced at 10 fps.
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This Rook makes a spectacular landing on the Meadow Post with a flowering
Cherry highlighting the colour contrast.
The images are half-a-second apart, the top image being displayed upwards to
leave them both clear.
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This Rook about to land on the Meadow Post shows a position like you might expect to find in an index of heraldic elements.
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The Round Pond trail-cam caught this Red Kite diving into the edge of Round Pond. A few seconds later the bird had stepped out of the water, and was gone 15 seconds later.
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This Red Kite was slowly turning in the air.
Three images from a single flight arranged in what we hope is an artistic
montage.
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The Beauty and the Beast?
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"Who is king of the Castle?"
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A pair of Rooks spent several minutes 'playing' in the wind calling and riding the air currents quietly circling each other. Still images never 'quite caught a moment' with both birds in frame so here is another Rook also enjoying this apparently effortless pastime.
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The tops of the Rook nest trees were swaying at least a couple of metres. Birds on the branches were struggling to keep balance.
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The 'grey' plumaged Tawny Owl probably spent 20 minutes on the Meadow Post (the camera stops after 5 minutes) before appearing on the Kitchen perch.
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Just one Tawny Owl visit to the Meadow Post this week
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This cloud looks remarkably like a birds single wing, thoughtfully decorated by 3 Rooks.
Maybe we are too used to seeing detached birds wings at the sight of Fox kills :-(
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Great Spotted Woodpeckers regularly visit the peanut feeder outside the study, and a camera sits on the desk ready to grab a pic of the GSW or anything else of interest. Woodpeckers can't get a whole nut out the wire mesh (not since a year of always undersized nuts) so they hammer nuts through the mesh and then extract a fragment. But it seems that they want the nuts more as crumbs, so wedge the nut in this well established cleft, and pulverise it there.
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We intended to caption this as a "flock of about 2000 starlings with at least half
as many out of frame on either side".
But our 'adventurous' side thought it was time to get an AI engine to help with
the counting. For no particular reason we landed on aicado.ai
who provided the following summary (HTML tags simplified, but text as shown):-
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Here we see a female reaching up to reach some particularly succulent morsel near then side door of the garage
 reaching up to feed near garage side door (montage)(r+mb id@768).jpg)
This female Reeves' Muntjac Deer has her back fur disturbed by what looks like several 'visits' by one of her 'gentlemen callers'.
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One of the male Reeves' Muntjac Deer (partly grown Antlers in velvet) quietly examines the ground near the east hedge gap.
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A third male Reeves' Muntjac Deer with Antlers as just pedicles - the permanent bony root of the antlers that is part of the skull.
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A rather magnificent Hare lollops by the Duck Pond in the early morning light.
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In the deep of the night this Hare spends a while on the patch near the east hedge gap.
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A more typical sighting of a Hare - this grey/brown blob 300m to the east turns out to be a Hare hunkered down in the growing crop.
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Through the Kitchen window we spot this young Rabbit on the island of the main pond. There is enough weed and plant roots for a small creature to 'walk' across and barely get their paws wet
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The Rooks continue to collect broken off twigs . There seems to be an unusual amount of fallen wood this year and we haven't noticed birds breaking pieces of twig from live trees as they sometimes have in the past.
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This Rook is just about to become a confused mess in among the bare branches
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An overwintered Peacock Butterfly on the leaf litter, still in fine condition.
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The same individual flew up onto the side of a ring of weldmesh, we use as an incinerator, to bask better angled towards the sun - still quite low in the sky even near mid-day.
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We estimate that easily hundreds of 7-spot Ladybird have appeared in mildly sheltered bushes, including this south facing accessible blackberry bush in the NE surrounds of the main pond.
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The male Roe Deer returned for a short visit. Here entering the site at the south hedge 10 minutes before midnight ...
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... and here walking past Round Pond 20 minutes after midnight near the middle
of the site.
Not caught of camera again - there are several places he could have exited
along the west and north boundaries
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A female Reeves' Muntjac Deer stops by the Hedge bottom for a moment.
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Mum may be just behind this Reeves' Muntjac Deer Fawn, but we don't see her on the trail cam.
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This pair of Robins enjoy their 'honeymoon' before boring incubation, frantic chick feeding, and finally back to fighting each other over territory through next winter.
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A bit of Rook togetherness high in a tree. We had several tries at putting the magic back into this moment, and ...
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... ended up liking the textures and delicacy of this negative version
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One of several Magpie pairs around the sites
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Female and male Mallard ducks are turning up at numerous photo sites. Our best pic of the pair is here on the bank of Duck Pond, showing unusual calm
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The male Mallard Duck may be dutifully following, but the female is often see on her own now. Her back is covered in tiny water drops either from a pond or rain.
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Exactly one pic of a Fieldmouse (Wood Mouse) in the whole week, and a lovely twee moment it is.
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Next morning at the same site another single corn seed gets nibbled by this classically posed Grey Squirrel.
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The local Robin for this bit of the south hedge guards the stone and unknowingly provides the camera with his reflection in the slowly running flood water.
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A lonesome Red-legged Partridge flees from the long mound outside our south hedge to vanish over the field to the south east
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Several of the Rook nests are now actively being created or refurbished,
and the supply of building materials is enjoying to watch.
The 3 images of the left, taken while the bird was being buffeted by a gusty wind,
are a selection indicating that the bird was struggling with 'his' load, lets go (middle)
and grabs the twig again in a perhaps more manageable position.
He flew behind the tree where we lost sight of him, but landed on the branch
housing the partly built nest where he takes the stick to his mate is currently
'trying it for size?'
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A Corkscrew Hazel tree near the conservatory has produced atypically
long male catkins this year. Near the base of some of them the tiny
red dots are flowers that catch the pollen from (hopefully) other trees.
The inserts is taken from close to the centre of the main image.
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A welcome renewed splash of colour as another Viburnum bursts into flower.
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Detail of the Viburnum flower near the centre of the above.
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