Norfolk Summer Holiday 2013

Just another quick post to share some of the pictures I took whilst on holiday in Norfolk. This post has actually been written in April 2014, but has been published for August 2013, when the holiday actually was. 

The flower below, discovered on a roadside verge on a walk is Centranthus ruber (Red valerian). I think I have the ID right here, although this particular plant must have been a young one because most of the descriptions and pictures I can find online seem to suggest that these flowers grow larger, with more flower heads than the one we found. Must thank the always useful Collins Flower Guide for help on this one.

Common blue butterfly at Cley Marshes on the north Norfolk coast (sadly the location where that US air force helicopter crashed earlier this year, killing 4 people). 

And finally, a few pictures taken from the kitchen window of the cottage we were staying in. A small brown looking bird was foraging through the climbing plants on the trellis of the back garden. Wasn't convinced on the ID at first but eventually came to the conclusion that it was a juvenile whitethroat. Just strange to see one so close to the house we were staying. Probably the best view of a whitethroat I will ever get. Photos are just record shots really but you can clearly tell what the species is. 

Actually quite disappointed I don't have more photos from this holiday. Norfolk's such a fantastic part of the world, and somewhere I've always enjoyed going on holiday to. Thanks for reading. 

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. 

Great Tit Chicks Still Going Well (17th-18th May)

It's been a few days since the chicks hatched in our camera nestbox on the 14th. The nest, which looked as though it had been attacked by something only contained two tiny chicks, the others which we presumed had died, or the eggs destroyed before they had hatched. The situation didn't look promising at all for the two remaining chicks, as the parents were struggling to feed the chicks hidden under the pile of messed up nesting material. The male especially, couldn't seem to feed the female, who wasn't particularly good at accepting the food which was being brought in to be passed onto the chicks. The amount of feeds from the parents was still quite high, and it seemed as though there was actually plenty of insect food to feed the chicks. 

Fast forward to now (the 18th), and amazingly, the two remaining chicks are still alive and both being fed by the parents. They are growing very slowly in size however. They are now 5 days old (including the day that they hatched), and they're still not an awful lot bigger than they were when they hatched. Maybe the attack on the nest caused the eggs to hatch slightly prematurely, and the chicks were smaller than they should have been. The video below shows a couple of feeds from the parents on the 17th. 

  

And the next video shows the situation of the nest on the 18th. As you can see, the video is in black and white, even though it was recorded in bright conditions in the late afternoon. So it seems as though the nesting material was covering the windows on either side of the nestbox again, stopping enough light getting into the box for colour images. Hopefully this won't last too long though, and things will be back to normal before too long.  



That's all for today's update. I just want to keep things ticking over here so that I don't have tons of stuff to get through. Thanks for reading and I'll probably be back with another video tomorrow, as things are at a pretty crucial stage right now.