Wednesday 26 December 2018

Morris and Mummers on Boxing Day

The Coventry Morris Men and the Coventry Mummers perform in the street in the village of Stoneleigh, a couple of miles from where I live, on Boxing Day every year. In over forty years of living here, I've never been to see them! But today I went with a friend who has often been before . . . on a slightly soggy and overcast day, but not actually raining . . . and I forgot to take my camera and ended up having to be opportunistic with just my phone.

Morris

Mummers

Monday 24 December 2018

Christmas Eve

I have processed and posted these photos while listening to the Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. I am one of the millions around the world for whom this annual live broadcast marks the beginning (and, actually, the best part!) of Christmas. Fifty years ago today I was, along with half a dozen friends, among the people queuing from very early in the morning to be admitted to the chapel to be part of the occasion. It's the only time I've done that, but the memory is refreshed every year when I hear the radio broadcast.

This morning started off misty, and then a pale winter sun burnt through the fog, with - surprisingly - enough heat in it to steam the moisture off the wooden fence panels . . . waves of vapour rising and glowing slightly in the low sun. The garden was briefly bathed in beautiful light and reflected in droplets of water . . . and all unseasonably and worryingly mild. The images below include a hellebore flower in bud too early, and buds on my cherry tree that are too far advanced already.










Sunday 16 December 2018

Winter reflections

A pre-lunch walk round the lake at the National Trust's Baddesley Clinton.






Monday 10 December 2018

Somerset Levels (4): the starling roosts

We saw the starlings flying into their roost twice, on two consecutive evenings. The photos below are all from the second day, when the light was marginally better. On the morning of the second day, some of us got up very early to go and see the flock wake and leave the roost.There is an amazing explosion of birds out of the reed bed but I have no publishable photos of that because the light was too poor to capture anything so fast-moving. Many of the birds took a bath in the water before flying off. In a reverse of their roosting, they broke into smaller flocks and dispersed in all directions, around the whole 360 degrees, thus spreading out to maximise their feeding opportunities. If it had been a bright clear morning (actually it was pouring with rain) we would have watched the birds flying up with Glastonbury Tor behind them, and the sun rising behind the Tor - what a view! We could barely see the Tor through the rain, and the sun was nowhere to be seen.

At dusk, the flocks fly in from all directions round the roosting site. Some fly low over your head and you are engulfed in a loud susurration from their wing beats. You are also likely to be crapped on! In fine weather, they may twist and turn in the skies for some time (confusing predators, which wait each day for them to arrive). But when it turns wet and windy they just pour down into the reeds. The calls of hundreds of thousands of birds make a wall of sound and the weight of them temporarily flattens the reeds, though they bounce back when the birds leave.














This last photo is made brighter than it really was, to show the vast black mass of starlings in the centre of the reeds. Shortly after this, with no light left, they flew off again, to the left and over trees to the next reed bed where they then stayed. They had also done this the previous day, and that second reed bed was where we went to see them wake in the early morning.


If I lived in the locality I would be there on every clear fine evening of the winter! Seeing this was one of the things on my 'bucket list' and I'm so glad to have been able to experience it, in spite of the weather.


Somerset Levels (3): fading rainbow and sunset over the trees




As the rain shower moved across, the rainbow moved, framing different groups of trees. Then the sun started to sink fast.








Somerset Levels (2): the reed beds

It's all about the reed beds. The Levels were first drained by the Romans and later by the Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century. The reclaimed land was mostly used for grazing. Now the revived and carefully managed reed beds, with drainage canals running through them, create a wonderful wildlife habitat, and are the magnet for the flocks of starlings (the 'murmurations') that create the spectacle in the evening sky.




The sepia effect of the photo below is caused purely by the very low sun glancing off the foliage and shining straight towards the camera lens - I haven't processed the image to look sepia!










Somerset Levels (1): daytime around the wetlands

I've recently spent a few days in the Somerset Levels in a group of 16, with two knowledgeable naturalists. For most of us, the main thing we wanted to see was the starlings roosting, which happen at dusk, so we had the daytimes to wander more widely.

I've been in two minds this time about posting my photos here, because they're technically poor! I knew that the whole trip would test my energy levels to the limit, so I only took a small, lightweight compact camera. We're in the darkest time of the year, close to the winter solstice, and the weather was darkly overcast and raining a lot of the time . . . and the main event happens at dusk . . . so I was trying to take photos of small birds, moving fast, in poor and failing light, with a small-sensor camera and only moderate zoom!

These spectacular starling displays only happen in the dark time of the year, when large flocks of starlings from the north of the European landmass migrate here to overwinter. To get good photos of these events you need clear skies and expensive professional equipment . . . but there's a story to tell here, so I've decided to post these grainy poor-quality images.

First, a variety of daytime images (though still in poor light) from wetland reserves around the Levels.

A mixed flock of starlings, lapwings and plovers, harried from their feeding into the air by predators - we often saw marsh harriers and peregrines. If you look below the higher flock, centrally downwards towards the smaller flock just rising, you will see a lone bird above that flock - predator. Also, below the upper flock, and over to the right - another predator.





Two of this year's cygnets, still with their mother, watching her feeding behaviour:



A flock of grazing lapwings (and a few gulls) suddenly flushed into the air by a marsh harrier. As they turn the weak sun flashes on the white patches of their plumage.








Glastonbury Tor in the background - on a clear day it would have been a wonderful view! Mixed flocks of ducks, one taking off, lapwing standing facing into the wind in the foreground.


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