Catching up

Hi all :) Before completely starting a clean sheet with this blog, there is some stuff which I really want to get posted without it getting buried under all my new photos and videos. Most of it is photos and videos from last year. Trouble is, once you've got into the habit of not updating it for a while, it can get much harder to get back to regular posting again. I really would like to get back into blogging and I won't ever leave this blog for good.

Obviously, should I go on to uni next year (which is the plan), blogging is pretty much going to be impossible, mostly given that I won't have a garden to post about :D The great thing about blogging though is that its entirely your own choice how or when you post. There should be no pressure attached. I've found in the past that trying to do a post when you're not motivated to do it is almost pointless. So in the future I will post whenever I can, and whenever I feel like it really. And if we have nest box activity in our camera next box, material on that will definitely get posted.

Cheers for sticking with me, and hopefully I'll be back on track with this from now on.

So, lets kick off then... back in May when I left you, I was half way through what was looking like quite a promising camera nest box diary. A pair of blue tits had built a nest, the female laid 7 eggs, and all 7 chicks looked to be growing quickly into healthy little blue tits. Both parents were regularly feeding the chicks mostly with caterpillars which seemed to be in decent supply. Unfortunately though, the male parent seemed to disappear at a pretty crucial time. I just didn't see him after he left, even feeding in the garden. So it might have been that he'd been eaten by something but I just don't know.

Anyway, things started to go downhill from here. The female blue tit was left to find food chicks by herself and was clearly struggling. She was spending far too long out of the nest looking for food. It seemed that the caterpillars which were in good supply a few days earlier had begun to run out, and she ended up bringing in suet from the fat blocks in the garden. She also spent too long sat on the nest at times and looked tired. The chicks became obviously weaker. I don't remember exactly how long the process took, but I remember being amazed at the speed at which a previously healthy looking nest goes downhill. Sadly, all 7 chicks died in the end after what had been an intriguing few weeks.

It was great though seeing that other blue tit nests around our area had been successful, as fledglings came to feed in our garden in the following weeks. And even though our nest wasn't successful, it was our first nest box diary and it was incredible to see what we did.

Anyway, enough of that, here's a few photos I never got round to posting last year :) I think these few photos were taken around the same time as the nest box diary actually, but I just didn't do anything with them as I was so focussed on the nest box at the time:

On the hunt for worms...

That's all for now, should hopefully be posting more catch up posts like this in the near future :)

I'm still here!

Hi everyone, just to let you know that I haven't given up on this blog. Its been months since I last posted and I left you half way through our next box diary. I do apologise about that, and I will finish off the diary when I can. It'll take me a while to get all the video together and everything, as its all on my other laptop, but you should be able to see that soon. I also hope to add a few posts to my blog earlier in the year, as a have a LOT of photos sitting on my laptop that I would like to share. Anyway, cheers for sticking with me, and I'll be back soon!

College lake in the sun

-- NOTE - This post was done in March 2012, but I have posted it so that it appears as having been published on 19th June 2011 -- 

College lake is one of my favourite reserves around my area to visit. Its not only a huge wetland habitat but contains a lot of scrub and woodland too, meaning a very large diversity of wildlife is attracted. Highlights there for me in the past have been sightings of a hobby, as well as a huge range of wildfowl. The lake itself is man made, and I think I'm correct in saying the site was originally a chalk quarry before it was flooded to form the lake which now makes up the majority of the reserve. The photo below shows the view across only a small part of the lake, with the sun shining on the water...

Due to the diversity habitats there, there's generally something to see all the way through the year. Whenever I go, I usually try and visit the feeding station they have there which is always very busy and has some interesting species. The first bird to show up though was one of the more common ones, a Robin. This one looked a bit scruffy but came up close for a nice photo...

Chaffinches were pretty much a permanent feature on these feeders, and it was rare not to see any there at any one time...

One of the birds I wasn't expecting to see at the feeding station was a yellowhammer. I've seen them plenty of times in the wild before, but never feeding with other birds at a feeding station. This one was happy to feed on the floor, picking up all the seed that had been dropped by the birds on the feeders above. The photo below isn't great and is more of a record shot but I'm happy that I got at least one shot of it before I left.

Larger scale feeding stations like this one also attract other ground feeding visitors though. Rats were pretty common there, which I can imagine is unpopular with some visitors to the reserve. I don't really have a strong opinion either way on them, although it did appear that numbers needed controlling a little here. The photo below came out quite nicely in the end.


Given the time of year, it was unsurprising to see flocks of blue and great tits with a number of fledglings. The majority of them were feeding themselves but there were still a few younger fledglings being fed by their parents. The suet balls were the food of choice, held in a sort of basket feeder.

After a few minutes of watching, I spotted a different bird moving around with the flock of blue and great tits- a marsh tit! I hadn't seen one before so seeing one up so close was quite exciting. Telling them apart from willow tits is very difficult, but I think I made the right decision here. I could be wrong though so please correct me if I am :) The cap of this bird was slightly glossy, which is one of the only differences between them and willow tits, so I think I'm right on this one- please correct me if you think I'm wrong. Being much less common than any other bird at the feeding station, and also in significant decline, the smart looking marsh tit grabbed my attention for a while, and was probably the best part of the trip in general.

So onto photographing it then... well lets say I probably could have done a better job! The first photo below was so nearly a brilliant photograph. The marsh tit was sat on the wire that can be seen in the photograph. I had set up my camera perfectly, zoomed in and focussed on the wire, but just as I pressed the shutter button, the bird took off. So the photo shows the bird just about to fly out of the shot. At the time I was really disappointed to have missed such a good opportunity. But after looking at it a few times, I actually quite liked the effect I had created. Although the bird came out quite blurry, I like the way its positioned in the photo, and also the nice blurred out background. Overall, the picture actually looks quite arty- completely accidental but it definitely turned out a bit better than I thought it had...

I did manage to get a couple more shots, but both are record shots really

So moving on from the feeding station, I then wandered around the reserve for a while. There's a path which you can follow which pretty much takes you round the whole lake, and through all the other habitats they have there. When I was there, I didn't really think to take any photos of the overall scene of the reserve. So the only pictures like that that I do have show only a small part of the reserve. The photo below shows a blurred out teasel plant in the foreground, with part of the lake and one of the newer hides in the background.

On the way round the reserve, a flower I hadn't seen before caught my eye on the edge of the footpath. I had no idea what it was until I spoke to someone walking past about it. He told me it was a Bee Orchid. I'm useless on flower ID but this one will definitely be remembered for next time- it has a very distinctive appearance. They are apparently relatively widespread around the UK if you know where to look. This BBC page explains some of the basic information about where to look for the various orchid species in the UK. And this site explains in more detail about Bee Orchids in particular, such as its distribution and the factors which are threatening it as a species.

And then I came across these daisy-like flowers (identification please). I used to know what they were but I've forgotten now :)

I also need some identification help on the bird in the photo below. Looks to me like it could be a juvenile pied flycatcher? I thought it could have been a juvenile whitethroat originally but it looks to be the wrong shape and with the wrong type of bill. I could be wrong though. The photo is pretty poor- was taken from a distance and cropped quite a lot. The bird was also sort of hidden in a bramble bush so it only appeared occasionally. See what you can make of the photo..

That's all for now everyone, keep checking back to the updates list as I still have a lot to add.