JC's Traveblog

We are both a little snowed under with digital images at the moment. One week after returning from a seven week trip around France, we went to a friend’s wedding and banged off several hundred more photos. Consequently, it is taking us a while to filter out the rubbish. However, while Carol works on a wedding album, I am making some progress on our French web album.

With both of us clicking away at critters large and small, some of my progress requires the use of iSpot of which I have become a HUGE fan. We don’t always know precisely what we’ve captured on pixels and wouldn’t want to misreport what we’ve seen. The wonderful folks at iSpot usually clear things up and frequently give more information than is found in our field guides, so another big thank you to them.

As keen as we both are on nature, we do, of course, recognize that it isn’t always pretty. This last trip seemed to produce a larger than usual bag of somewhat macabre sights that we were “privileged” to witness. Of course, for the most part these situations are just nature taking its course with one subsection, the predators, trying to live of another subsection, the prey.

The first instance provides an opportunity to use a picture that is interesting enough but, perhaps, not quite good enough for a trip web album, largely because the subject was too distant, even for TheBeast, and going away (now there’s a surprise). A black kite swooped down on our favourite camp site lake, the sheep farm at Fanjeaux, and is clearly flying off with some hapless victim in its talons. You can see the head down examining its catch. The lake is teeming with thousands of frogs but there are also fish, as we shall shortly see.

Continuing in the less-disturbing vein, on one of farmer Luc’s walks, while I was off chasing very active butterfly prey harmlessly with pixels, Carol spotted a relatively small spider apparently tucking into a butterfly, more specifically a Clouded Yellow. I have no idea what species the spider could be but I may try iSpot to see if the good folks there can enlighten me. Being a fan of butterflies, it isn’t my favourite image but the spider is just doing what comes naturally. Last year we saw a very large Garden Spider tucking into my other favourite, a damselfly.

Now the feint-hearted should, perhaps, look away. In addition to literally thousands of frogs and some fish, our lake (we get very possessive about it) contained at least one water snake. One day we spotted it swimming along with a fish (a perch, I believe) in its mouth. It seemed to be having trouble with the size of its “prey item”. It struggled about over some weed but eventually left the lifeless fish alone, uneaten. What a waste! A day or so later, while stalking dragonflies and damselflies by la digue (the dyke) that retains the lake, we spotted a snake, perhaps the same one, tackling a humongous tadpole. These tadpoles were the Goliaths of tadpoles, being at least 3 ins/9 cms long with v. large heads. Those with a strong enough stomach may be able to see that the poor tadpole, still alive, has a fair sized hole in the top of its head and quite a bit of skin missing. Once again, the snake seemed to give up on its over-sized prey and left it to die a slow death.

Finally to something a little different. This has nothing to do with making a living; it just seemed to be parent brutality. The lake was home to a number of breeding waterfowl, amongst them a family of Coots with seven chicks. After watching them for a week or so we noticed one parent biting the head of one of its chicks, for no readily apparent reason. It happened several times. I assume that it was the same chick but I have no evidence to that effect. I used iSpot and was told that this behaviour is not uncommon with Coots and that they will occasionally pick on a chick until it stops following them around and, presumably, perishes. One comment from iSpot was, “it’s hard to like Coots”. I know what they mean. Maybe this has something to do with clutch size? We don’t know. Both parents were otherwise very attentive and tireless feeders of their brood. Peculiar!

A pair of swans has been nesting beside a bridge over the Grand Union Canal close to our house. On Thursday last week I noticed that the little grey balls of fluff had hatched. On Friday en route to a pub lunch I went armed with a camera but, to my surprise, the family had swum the nest. That was quick.

Today we took our cameras on a more serious search looking along the canal towards town. Finally we found them, both parents and eight cygnets, just before a lock about a mile “upstream”. They seemed unconcerned as we began clicking away, perhaps because their nest had been adjacent to a car park where admirers frequently gathered.

Whilst people seemed to cause the swans little concern, ducks were another issue. There was an explosion of activity as the cob suddenly got in a flap over a mallard’s proximity, took to the wing and chased it back along the canal skimming the water all the way.

With father absent, the pen and cygnets continued swimming around apparently unconcerned. We watched fascinated as a couple of the cygnets began scrambling up onto mother’s back and nestled down to hitch a ride between her wings. This is not behaviour that we’d ever witnessed before in swans though we had seen a grebe chick riding on a parent’s back. Sometimes the cygnets seemed to be sheltering but occasionally one or two heads would pop out to look around. Naturally, given the fluffy subjects, two cygnets riding pillion on their graceful mother’s back was an endearing site.

Father eventually returned in shower of water droplets having left the mallard in no doubt that its presence was not appreciated.

Ya just gotta love wildlife.

Keith’s birthday. that is: today. Keith doesn’t “do” birthdays. Keith doesn’t do birthdays so much that he doesn’t even know in which month his parents birthdays fall. Curious. In order not to do Keith’s birthday today, since it was a good day for walking (i.e. dry) we all sauntered two miles along the Grand Union Canal to The Three Locks where Keith & Marlene very kindly treated us to some jolly fine burgers washed down by a drink or two. Thank you very much, Keith & Marlene.

We sauntered the two miles back along the canal and sat briefly on our patio where those unaccustomed to walking four miles in one day began to recover.

On the house above our patio we have a nesting box. It is currently the scene of some frenetic feeding activity by our resident blue tit and its partner. I say resident because, above our patio, in addition to a nest box, we also have a bat box in which one of our nesting pair of blue tits roosts. It has been roosting in our bat box for several years. We know it is the very same blue tit because it has a distinctively misshapen chest stripe. We suspect that Zigzag Chest is a male because of his apparent territorial displays and his still flying around during incubation.

Fortunately the desire to keep delivering a constant supply of food to their young seems to overcome the blue tits’ fear of us so I took the opportunity to set my camera up on the patio mounted on a tripod and armed with “The Beast” complete, for the very first time, with its 1.4X extender. The extender forces the use of manual focus but, with my subject being a fixed target, this constituted an ideal situation.

My first shot proved that I needed fill-in flash – thank Darwin for digital preview screens. I added my flash gun to my growing array of deployed camera equipment. Another few shots indicated that I could benefit from a stop or so of under-exposure. Eventually I was getting shots with which I was comfortable. I clicked away for half an hour or so then left the diligent little nesters in peace, with thanks.

Once loaded on the computer and reviewed, I was very pleased with the results from The Beast plus extender. [Let’s use Java nomenclature and call this combination TheBeast++.] On the RAW images, the blue tits’ individual feather filaments show very nicely and, of particular interest I think, is being able to see the food items being delivered to the nest. Hopefully these smaller JPEGs are nearly as clear. I’ve reproduced one shot (far right) that isn’t the greatest line up but it does clearly show, grasped in the blue tit’s beak, the legs, body segments and wings of some hapless flying creature about to become lunch for junior. The images are full frame, just squared off to remove irrelevant sides.

Happy birthday Keith and well done TheBeast++.

A couple of things returned to our back garden today. Unfortunately, one of them was the snow which was, of course, also in the front garden and all our neighbours’ gardens. Still, it is February and that’s often a bad month, never mind my getting a year older.

On a brighter note, hawk-eyed Carol was once again staring out of the window when a much more welcome visitor returned, this time to our nice new niger seed feeder. We’ve seen a small flock of Siskins in a few previous years but today was the first time that we’d spotted one this season. By some miracle, it stayed long enough for me to bring a camera to bear on it with the requisite tripod. Of course, I still desperately need a better lens. Even more fortunately, this Siskin was cooperatively on the correct side of the feeder. The colourful character showing its back end on the opposite side of the feeder is that other niger-seed-loving individual, a Goldfinch. Both the Goldies and Siskins have very different feeding behaviour to the Tits and Chaffinches in that they tend to occupy a perch and stay there feeding. Most other smaller birds grab a beakful of food and fly away with it.

Just to bulk things out a bit, this wider shot shows quite an interesting grouping with the Goldfinch and Siskin in the company of a Great Spotted Woodpecker. The Woodpecker darn nearly frightened the Siskin away but fortunately it stood its ground.

This being the weekend of the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, we’ve been doing quite a lot of bird feeder filling and staring out of our windows at the resultant flocks of feathered friends. In fact, on Friday, not being above bribery, we even invested in a new niger seed feeder in the hope of encouraging our visiting Goldfinch to stick around. The niger seed feeder is a different design and it seems to have confused most of our feathered friends; they’ve been flying around it, sometimes landing on the perches, staring at it with the avian equivalent of a puzzled expression and then flapping straight back off to the sunflower seed feeder empty beaked.

As luck would have it, the ever hawk-eyed Carol spotted something a little different this morning during our first Sunday window-gazing session. In our somewhat limited experience, it initially looked most like a female Chaffinch gone wrong. We consulted the field guide. Fortunately, on the same page as the Chaffinch and right beneath it was the obvious culprit: our new visitor seemed to be a female Brambling. [Ed: Sounds like something you should be making into jam, really, doesn’t it?] Bramblings are almost exclusively winter migrants from good ol’ Scandinavia (again) and are sometimes referred to as the Chaffinch of the North, according to Birdguides. I hope no pretentious artist builds a humongous statue of one beside the A1 near Gateshead. At least others must have thought Chaffinches and Bramblings looked similar, too.

Unfortunately we haven’t spotted a male (which has a blacker head) but we were very happy to have been window-gazing when this delightful lady turned up. Here’s a few shots at various angles to show the colours and markings.

Our Goldfinch came back later and finally seems to be getting the hang of the niger seed feeder. Excellent!

Yesterday we were In Search of the Holy Grail in the form of one of our rarer avian garden visitors, a Treecreeper. No sooner had we been thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice if we got a shot of a Treecreeper”, than a pair of Treecreepers dutifully turned up and provided at least a long distance (minimal) shot. Today we were discussing, amongst ourselves (as you do), what other less than frequent visitors we might like to capture on pixels. A Blackcap sprang to mind. A Blackcap sprang to mind largely because we have seen one just a couple of times in the 20 years that we’ve lived here. “Dream on”, I said, wittily, “we’ve only ever see A Blackcap once or twice”.

This afternoon I popped out to visit my mother en route to an afternoon U3A Digital Imaging Group meeting. As usual we discussed very little to do with digital imaging but had a nice cup of tea and a biscuit or two – a bit like giving blood, really. [Ed: Life gets terribly exciting sometimes, doesn’t it?] Upon my return what does Carol proudly show me on the rear screen of her camera? Two pictures, very nicely taken, of a male Blackcap sitting hunched up on the squirrel baffle of one of our bird feeders. Her pride was very justified. “Yikes”, or words to that effect, “it’s a Blackcap!” I couldn’t believe it – on two days running we get a talk-of-the-Devil-and-he-shall-appear kind of moment.

Tomorrow I think I’ll start a discussion about Siskins; we haven’t seen them yet this year.

A few weeks ago when we had red berries in our garden and Redwings were in town after them, I noticed that our local Blackbirds appeared to be getting aggressive trying to chase the Redwings away. Since then, the red berries and Redwings have gone but the Blackbirds started taking up station around the peanut and sunflower seed feeders (standing on the squirrel baffles beneath them) and seemed to be trying to hog those instead. I was particularly pleased this week when the BBC’s Snow Watch programme confirmed my observations and singled out Blackbirds as becoming a little protective of food sources in these harsh conditions.

Great Tits can be aggressive, too, and have an interesting threat posture, wings and tail flared, which doesn’t seem to be weather dependent. We are quite used to seeing them bullying Blue Tits and Coal Tits, most other birds on our feeders actually, even in the summer.

Since our weather continues to be particularly uninspiring I once again stayed home and trained both our cameras on two different feeders to see what I could snap. I was after Coal Tits to fulfil a commission (from Rosemary ) but they are fast little perishers and quick reactions are necessary – quicker than mine usually are, it seems. Undeterred I set up and began clicking away. While I was mostly missing my intended quarry, a Great Tit landed on one feeder and dutifully adopted its classic threat posture. The little darling was even obligingly facing the camera. He really looked quite splendid with his bright yellow waistcoat.

Threats aside, I did manage to fill my commission and snapped a Coal Tit or two before they made good their escape. A couple of shots showing their distinctive white flash at the back of the head and neck are on the left. Just for fun, on the right is an arty (i.e. blurry) shot of a male Chaffinch grabbing a sunflower seed whilst on the wing, too. Show off!

It was our 2005 trip to Crete that started me thinking this way. After the highlight of the trip, a stunning walk down the impressive Samaria Gorge, we caught a ferry to Loutro, a delightful village round a horseshoe-shaped bay which it is possible to access only by foot or by boat. One of the bars sported a friendly Congo African Grey Parrot (right – the picture is from Wikipedia Commons courtesy of snowmanradio). What is the most striking feature of this bird? Quite so, it has a startlingly bright red tail. To me, the name seemed completely inappropriate. I would expect creatures to be named after distinctive features. The Americans, for example have a Red-winged Blackbird which is both black and has red flashes on its wings. The Americans have a Cardinal Bird which is, surprise, surprise, cardinal red. How descriptive.

Recently, to our delight, our garden was invaded by our winter visiting, so-called Redwings. (Yes, I know – I’ve really had my money’s worth out of the Redwings. ) Do they have a red wing? No, they have a red armpit or flank under the wing but the wing is not red. They would more appropriately be called Redflanks or Red Armpits. I rather like Redflanks – it has a good ornithological ring to it. There are Redstarts, Redpolls, redheads, and Redshanks; why not Redflanks? Anyway, our Redflanks/Redwings have all moved on because the red berries (yes, they are both red and berries) have all been eaten.

A regular visitor to our bird feeders is the very striking Greater Spotted Woodpecker. These beautiful birds nest in the Silver Birch trees out the back and we frequently have two or three in our garden at any one time. Is it spotted? No, not really; striped perhaps but not really spotted. Again, the most distinctive feature of both sexes seems to be a bright red lower belly, sort of under the tail. “Greater” is fine because there is also a smaller Lesser Spotted Woodpecker which, incidentally does not have the red lower belly. What a strange name to choose.

This week, again to our delight, we have been seeing another unusual visitor to our garden: Bullfinches. Why is this bird called a Bullfinch? Look at it; the male’s most distinctive feature is a fabulous red breast. Were I female I would probably know precisely what shade of red (cardinal, vermilion, scarlet?) but I’m male so red is red and red will have to do. Why is it not a Redfinch or a Red-breasted Finch? Wide though our selection of garden birds is, we don’t usually see Redfinches/Bullfinches. The female is, of course, more subdued but still a very handsome bird and we are very happy to have seen them.

[Ed: There you are, I told you. Carol has just checked my copy and declares that she thinks the Bullfinch’s breast is salmon. Salmonfinch doesn’t really cut it for me, I have to say. Salmonfinch doesn’t sound ornithological at all.]

Incidentally, given that we’re stuck with Bullfinch, shouldn’t the female be a Cowfinch? A female Peacock is a Peahen, after all.

Visitors of the avian sort, that is. Last week in a moment of madness, I ventured out to walk along an unfamiliar stretch of our local Grand Union Canal in search of clues to a geocache. It was just an excuse to play with my early Christmas present, an eTrex handheld GPS device, really. I didn’t find the geocache (must practice) but at one point along my walk I noticed I was pushing before me quite a flock of thrush-sized birds. The light was wrong (behind them) and, since they kept receding as I approached, I never got a clear view. I heard their calls, though, and suspected them to be Redwings.

For the most part, Redwings are winter migrants to Britain, arriving October-ish. They may be as common as muck in Scandinavia where they breed in huge numbers but for me, they are a little more special. Our Birdguides disc says that they have a preference for birch trees which, since we are pretty much surrounded by Silver Birch trees, may explain why several Redwings visited our garden today.

The other reason our garden looked attractive, I suspect, is that it has a plentiful supply of bright red berries in a bush just outside our windows. The bush is actually our neighbour’s but it hangs over the fence between us. Carol spotted the Redwings flying sorties from the birch trees to the bush and enjoying a hearty breakfast. Our garden is usually full of birds but, since we do not possess huge, professional lenses costing £thousands, it isn’t often we get a decent chance to get pictures of them from the comfort of our house.

Carol grabbed her camera and several photographs, including these two. Bravo! I’ve cropped them down a little but the quality can take it. When you get close enough with some light, Redwings are very attractively marked birds.

I was feeling a bit lost today. It’s a day off in the Tour de France so there was no racing to watch this afternoon. Mind you, after a particularly exciting start to Le Tour last week, the weekend’s stages in the Pyrenees didn’t seem to provide much actual racing, either. All but one of the main contenders seemed uninterested in chasing down any breakaways and were content to plod home (relatively speaking) and maintain the status quo. Everyone seems to be waiting for a showdown, hopefully in the Alps but at least up the killer Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day. Somebody should inform the team managers that cycling is of itself worth absolutely nothing and that the entire team becomes worth something only when/if entertainment is involved. Fortunately the Pyrenean scenery was stunning in the glorious weekend sunshine. Let’s hope a few flat sprint stages back across France in the coming week inject more life into the proceedings.

Since we also had clear calendar and were effectively thumb twiddling, we decided to brave the forecast showers, some of which might be heavy, to go and see if there was any activity at Whipsnade Zoo. It would, after all, be one of our last chances for a civilized visit as it is fast-approaching the time when it becomes a no-go zone courtesy of the summer school holidays. I can’t help but think that Wimbledon fortnight was summer and that, since the weather now seems to have resumed normal service, the poor little rugrats have rather missed the boat, but I digress once again …

Most of Whipsnade’s inmates appeared similarly unimpressed by our blistering July temperatures and were mostly subdued. A group of people on what I imagine was a keeper experience day did get the small-clawed otters jumping around with excitement as they threw them pieces of dismembered rat for lunch. I decided I didn’t really want a picture of a painfully cute small-clawed otter rather ruining its image with a rat tail dangling from its mouth as it chewed its way through the pelvic girdle. Patience was rewarded by a decent photo opportunity as we made our way towards the exit past a few emus that were clearly having a collective bad hair day. Mind you, the rain probably wasn’t helping their coiffures.

After the emus became bored with posing, we added a completely new critter to our collection when we made a rare excursion into the so-called Discovery Centre, which seemed like a reasonable place on a relatively quiet day to escape the cool and damp. In a pleasantly calm and quiet atmosphere, an impressive sail-finned lizard was basking under its sun lamp, and who could blame it. I didn’t really notice the stunning blue colour of its eye until we returned to process our efforts.

We’ve had more interesting days at Whipsnade but I did come away with something.