Thanks to Jenny for sending in this wonderful picture of Starlings flocking above Gretna Green motorway service station in late November. Apparently starlings do impressions - of a dolphin in this case.
I've never seen a truly massive flock of starlings doing their thing but I understand the noise is also quite something. More pictures of their swooping, wheeling forms via Google.
A couple of pleasant and typically autumnal scenes for you, in case the darkening days are starting to get you down. Both of these are in UKNB's home town of St Albans, so if you're local you might recognise the first one at least.
We have a neat bird feeder that attaches to the glass of our sliding doors which affords us close up views of blue tits and great tits for the main part. They seem entirely happy to be there just a few feet from you, though if you move much they dash off. This squirrel however is totally fearless and seems to understand how glass works - i.e. you can get as close as you like on the other side of it but you can't touch it.
This allows for some close-up squirrel photography, though reflections can be a bit of a problem, as can the dirty windows and lack of light on the side I'm photographing.
I'm not going to fool anybody that this is an owl in the wild - the tethers dangling from its legs give that away, but it's still quite challenging to get a decent shot at a falconry display. An uncluttered 'natural' background and good focus are quite tough to achieve, though probably easy with owls that with falcons swooping around and greater speeds (I've tried and failed). Set camera to continuous focus and a high shutter speed and try to track it accurately so the autofocus can do its best. Still a bit of a hit and miss affair mind you!
This particular Barn owl is at Willows Farm Village in Hertfordshire, which is incidentally a good fun day out for young children! They have 46 birds in their falconry centre.
I have been lucky enough to see Barn owls in the wild too, flying in daylight at The Lost Gardens of Heligan and at dusk in Norfolk. Note that Barn owls don't go twit-twoo - that is in fact a call/response between female and male Tawny owls, though I heard a lot of that at night in Norfolk too, emanating from the woods.
I was lucky enough to be invited to a photography competition yesterday held in London. About 35 miscellaneous bloggers were challenged by Microsoft to go out for a few hours and come back with photos representing London as part of the Your Britain marketing effort.
I'm pleased to say that UKNB won in the nature section, with the image above. Not particularly naturey to be honest, but containing plenty of iconic ingredients of a British summer: striped deckchairs, wind, roses, grass and gardening.
There were some rules that made things just a little bit more challenging. Because the images were theoretically destined to be the background for bing.com for a day (though mine wasn't winningy enough to achieve that glorious honour) they had to be in landscape format; not include human faces; not include obvious commercial branding; generally suitable for use in that context.
Faced with low light and dusky conditions that make for blurry photos? Use it to your advantage and let the long exposure times become a creative asset!
By zooming in whilst taking this shot of a tree I think I've transformed an otherwise dull picture into something quite dramatic. You also wouldn't know that it was actually getting quite gloomy, being 8:42pm a few days ago. I actually set the aperture to f20 to make sure of a long enough exposure to get the effect I was after, which was half a second in this case, at ISO 800. In retrospect I should have knocked the ISO down to 200 and used a larger aperture to get the same result but with less noise.
After yesterday's introduction, here follows the second instalment in our big interview with Chris Packham, supporting Allinson's Conservation Grade program and associated free bird feeder promotion. The third and final instalment is also now available.
In fact you may well have seen Chris on TV this evening presenting the Animal's Guide to Britain on BBC2. I thought it was rather good, especially the beavers and jumping up and down on the rippling layer of 'land' atop a buried lake.
Topics this time round include being something other than a bird-spotter and Chris' nature photography. Stay tuned for more, including Chris' favourite nature related joke in the next instalment!
If you've never looked at a woodlouse up close you might not notice how interesting and pretty they can be! I was particularly drawn to this one (admittedly a strange phrase given the subject) as it looked more colourful and patterned than the usual woodlice that I see, which are just a uniform grey. It also seemed to run about three times faster than woodlice I'm familiar with.
As usual with these things I feverishly looked it up, expecting to find that I had unveiled an exotic invader or even a whole new species, only to find that it is the "common woodlouse". So how come I haven't noticed these patterned ones before? I think the usual ones that sneak across the carpet must be the common rough or common shiny woodlice.
Feeding time for the otters at Whipsnade Zoo. As if I could get a picture like that in the wild!
An interesting new series Stargazing Live starts tonight at 8pm on BBC 2, running for three nights in a row. Professor Brian Cox (favourite of ladies of a certain age) and Dara O Briain (a new direction for Dara?) host live stargazing, featuring various observatories around the world, and no doubt running the full scale from 'you can do this in your own back garden' to 'epic images courtesy of the world's biggest telescopes'.
The BBC also has a tie-in news item on stargazing, this apparently being a great time for it with celestial conditions setup well. However a clear sky and minimal light pollution are harder to find in the UK, and it discusses that topic at length too.
