Skomer Island

The photos in this post were all taken on a day at Skomer Island, as part of a four day field trip to the South Pembrokeshire coast for my degree course. We were lucky enough to get a guided boat tour around the island to get a great view of the puffins, guillemots and grey seals. Here's a collection of the images I managed. Some of them were taken on the mainland before we headed out on the boat tour. 

I tried to use captions for the images on this blog post but never again will I attempt that; the formatting issues it creates are a nightmare, and virtually everything needs fixing in the HTML to fix it, so I'm just gonna describe photos in my usual unprofessional way instead; below is one of a huge area of foxgloves found on the mainland.

Lots of rock pipits were around, but they were usually at quite a distance, so the record shot below is the best I managed. 

Some grey seals chilling on the rocks. Picture taken from the tour boat.

Large colonies of guillemots on the cliff faces... 

And finally, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction to the island, puffins: 

Glad I finally managed to get this post up, had these photos hanging around for ages. Thanks for reading folks. 

Woodland colours

Recently, I visited a local woodland to do some birdwatching. I saw quite a range of birds, but most surprisingly, a wide range of plants too.

On a few of the trees in the woods, a rusty brown lichen was seen on the bark. I am assuming that it is lichen, please correct me if I am wrong. It did literally look like the tree had gone rusty and it was a really interesting effect.

Also seen was this moss-like plant on the woodland floor. Foxgloves were seen along the edges of the path. It was great to see such a range of colours. The air was quite damp and my camera lens steamed up from time to time, so there were little bird photograph opportunities.

I know this has been a short post, although I plan to post again a bit later so do pop back.