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.

Summer mix & match

Over the last few weeks, I have been collecting some garden photos for this posting. I thought I would do a bit of a mix and match posting, rounding off the summer so far. I haven't posted in a while, so this posting has quite a few photos in store...

First up then, a photo which I should have posted ages ago. It really is a bit out of date now. A month or two ago, we saw Alliums bursting out in the front garden. It is the first year we have planted them, and certainly won't be the last either.


In the back garden, the birds have been busy feeding most of the time, despite the hot weather. This female Chaffinch was seen amongst the fruit bushes a couple of weeks ago. I was quite surprised with how well the photo came out. Its sometimes not until you view the photo on the computer these things.


The Goldfinches have really got through the Nyjer Seed fast recently. The feeder is now quite near the end of the garden so it seems to be getting more visitors. I'm not sure why, but photos of Goldfinches taken by me often appear quite grainy.


And lastly, a Blackbird, which looks to be a juvenile, although it may just be a female. We have seen a few more Blackbirds around this year.


Hopefully I can get back to frequent posting now. I have a couple more postings planned for this week. Even though this is my first post i a while, I have still been reading all of your blogs too. As it is the summer holidays here, I have lots of time to do more on the blog.

Well-behaved foxes

Just recently, on my blogoversary posting, I showed you some photos of a family of foxes which we saw on the railway bank, beyond the garden fence. The photos were really just record shots, and I was really hoping to see them again and get some better footage/photos. Well, we were in luck as we saw the following unfold in the garden yesterday morning...




Yep, at about 7:45, we saw an adult fox visit the garden in full view from us in the house. It had jumped over the fence at the end of the garden and trotted down the garden path. Thankfully, my camera was already on my tripod next to me, and I took one photo and one video. It was so well-behaved that it even took a drink from our new pond. I was expecting to see the odd frog visit the pond, not a fox drinking from it in broad daylight.

After taking a drink, it had a wander around the swing and looked inside the new fenced-off wildlife area. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of memory card space just at the wrong moment, and cut out halfway through the clip. The fox stayed for another 30 seconds or so, before running back down the garden and jumping the fence again. So, no cubs this time, but I was still thrilled to see the adult fox as I got up in the morning.

Whilst the video is slightly blurry after being uploaded, I was still really chuffed to get such close-up images of it. If you remember, the last photos I got of the foxes weren't great because of the poor light conditions, but I certainly didn't have that problem yesterday morning. I hope you like the still photo too. Its still not the greatest, but probably the best I'm ever going to get.


After watching the video a couple of times and looking at the photo, I noticed that the fox isn't very big and has blackish fur in some places. I wondered if this was actually an adult at all, or whether it is an older cub (from last year maybe). Either that, or its just an adult who isn't eating enough to stay healthy. This could be why it visited our garden- to look for any food scraps available.

I wonder if these foxes visit at night too. The fox did seem to go straight for the pond, as if had visited it a few times before. Obviously, its hard to tell if they have visited, but occaisionally, we get muddy footprints appearing around the garden in the winter. I suppose our two pet rabbits are probably a bit of a target for the foxes, especially in the winter when less food is around.

It is great to see that foxes appear to be doing well in sub-urban environments like ours, and there are certainly plenty of them around. Maybe an infra-red night camera would help to show us what happens in the garden at night.

Sorry about the slight lack of postings just recently. In the summer holidays (only a couple of weeks away now) I hope to post more often. I look forward to reading all your blogs too as the warm summer continues.