2013- The Year In As Many Characters or Fewer

Hello internet! Remember me? No me neither. Still, i've had a fairly mental last few months so it's perhaps unsurprising how little time i've had for updating this page, and to be honest photos have been few and far between in any case so haven't had much reason to do so. Still, given it's the end of the year and it worked last year I've decided to do a festive roundup of the year that was 2013. So pick up something festive (i'd reccomend a mince pie, I think it's about the only time it's acceptable to do this so go for it), settle down into a comfortable chair and read on.

So back to January. I had a busy January, a month of dissapointing precipitation punctuated by dissapointingly aversge AS exams and appropriately virolent norovirus. Still, every cloud an' all and there was more than a little hangover of last year's Waxwing hordes, all over Greater Manchester. It'd be rude not to, wouldn't it...?



February dawned cold, as might be expected. It was for me a month of freedom, sufficiently far from the last exam season for me to feel like getting outside, but far enough from the next lot to get some serious birding trips in. Like to Llyn Padarn in Wales, for instance...



March came, as it always seems to, directly after February. And with March the undesirable hum of the revision machine whirred into life, so the garden was destination number one for my newest passion, the secret world of the Collembola...



April decided the revision machine had cut in prematurely, so the focus was shifted to the Isle of Mull, and to the shores of Loch Na Keal. Birds, Beasts and the wonderful world of the celtic-punk band Flogging Molly ensued, along with the first real coup for my new self-assembly hide with this Yellowhammer...



May was a month of depressing dullness it's barely worth a mention, but mention it we must (otherwise it'd ruin the chronology of what is in fact a very decent post). But there aren't any photos from May so let's move onto June and have two from there, first off these fantastic Great Crested Grebes, illuminated by the dawn light reflecting the colours of the M60 into the water...



...and of course this stunning Bonxie from Handa, an important breeding site for these mental birds...



But soon as June was done with July was rather inconsiderately knocking at the door. And so it was I missed a music festival to go to summer school (it's honestly not as boing as it sounds!) and then went to Wales to be eaten alive by insects. Then we went on holiday to France, where I learnt that even in foreign countries people don't understand the need to get low for that all important shot...



So with July cleared away it became August (surprisingly) and a short stay down south in Cornwall ensued. No shots of note from there, but even at this 'dead period' my spiritual home of Hilbre Island turned up the goods in the form of a few resting Dunlin...



...And so September was here! Back to school, the grindstone and the perpetual moaning about how little photography was being done. But to be honest Pectoral Sandpiper in Bolton was my month's highlight so I can hardly bemoan it, can I...?



...And just 30 days after it began September had ended. Scandalous. Still, October valliantly stepped up to take it's place, and when the smoke had cleared it was apparent this was going to be the migrant season of a lifetime. Not that i'd take full advantage of it, though Lesser Scaup and Glossy Ibis were pretty memorable...



...November came and with it talk of such bullshit as UCAS, offers, interviews and other such unmentionables. Though a trip to London gave some interest. So not many photos to speak of, although a colour ringed Black Headed Gull provided some interest...



...and here we are. Back again. I spent a slightly mental first half the month doing interviews, spent an altogether happier second half back out in the field. Most exciting find was a Bank Vole, which (hopefully!) promises photo opps into the future...



...so I guess this is the end really. Thatcher gone, Mandela gone, me 17, applications sent to university, saw Frank Turner live in Manchester...it's been quite a year; 2013, it's been nice knowing ya. Good luck and happy hunting to everyone in the new year, and let's hope Liverpool can keep up what has been thus far the best season of my sentient existence!

See you on the other side!

Joe

Transportation (Or 'Nice Pecs')

One of the things I find odd (and I suspect everyone else finds acutely annoying) about photography is the way I can completely ignore the passage of time. Lunchtime? Time to catch the train home? No idea. It all passes me by. Which is fantastic in a way, I can think of very few things that can so totally absorb you as photography.

And this happened the other day, lying as I was in the shallow waters of Rumworth Lodge. There was Pectoral Sandpiper there, a lifer for me and a bird i've always wanted to get in front of the lens since i'm stupidly obsessed with drab wading birds. Anyhow there I was, cold, muddy and smelling faintly of something I couldn't quite put a finger on and there it was, sitting 20ft away sleeping...



But then it gets up and walks over to me, picking delicately at the mud. And through that viewfinder, covered as it is by my muck and mud and crud, the colours of the water and the sky blur with that of the land and you could, for a second, be forgiven you were somewhere in the arctic watching this bird on a peat pool...






...picking towards me indirectly, you could acutally see its footprints in the soft mud...



...and the closer it got, the more you could see the resemblance to other birds in it. The Snipe's brown, the shape of the Dunlin...



...a raptor overhead see it duck low, one eye fixed on high before lying down completely...





...and then all of a sudden its too close for the frame, so you go for the headshot...



...and then its too close for anything, and you wait patiently for it to retreat a little so as you can focus on it...





...and off it potters, along the shore back to its favourite spot near the bush. I have no idea its been nearly 2hrs in the making, but the shot I want is in the can and i'm off home.

'Le Animaux des Alps'- The Mud Puddlers

In Britain it would be quite hard to identify butterflies. It would be, but us Brits have cunningly avoided such problems, by inventively and indiscimniately eliminating entire species, so that there are fewer and thus identification is indefinitely easier. Those stupid Europeans though, they don't understand this simple trick! With there endless alpine meadows of an endless assortment of flowers, they're just making it hard for themselves.

But joking aside, the variety is utterly stunning. But superlatives aren't making me any better at identifying them, despite my best efforts most of them remain unidentified. So if you know one of the below please do pipe up, you'll make a man very happy!

Still, the post title comes from a habit I found out Butterflies do, they congregate in huge numbers on the paths when they're wet. Which means that to photograph them I have to lie in the mud. So not pleasant. But still, its a genuinely interesting phenomenon as the butterflies aren't drinking, they are (allegedly) sucking up salts and amino acids. And in fact some moth species have taken 'mud puddling' to extremes, adapting mouth-pieces for blood-sucking, the most potent of all puddles.

But thankfully these little beauties weren't quite so vicious and stuck to more conventional puddles, and boy were they there in spades...



...when walkers come though...



...I guess there's salt in sweat, and this little fella capitalised on it...!



...with a little fill flash...



...What i'm hesitantly calling a Moutain Argus...?



...looks Skipper-esque, but not sure...



...and one I can actually ID...!



And alas I'm gonna have to start scraping the Alpine barrel soon, but there's a few more posts in me yet...!

'Le Animaux des Alps'- Le Rouge et Noir

We're all proud of the stupidest, most insignificant things aren't we? I mean look at my birding record, my proudest moment of UK birding was this winter when I spotted a Glaucous Gull in flight and pointed it out to a fellow birder. Hardly inspiring stuff. Or my Greater Manchester highlight, spotting Little Egret on my local water park. But these are trumped into insignificance by my foreign highlight, which isn't even rare.

When I was but a little kiddiwink, complete with oversized and over-focussed Viking binoculars, we went on holiday to France and to the mountains, as I have done many times since. When there we stayed in a little place I can't remember the name of, but the point was that I could see all these little birds around the place, all foraging round car parks and in the gardens and on the roads. What were they? I asked this question to my birdbook, a less-than-portable coffee table photographic version of the Hamlyn guide.

And my first birding coup was finding the answer to this question; the 'Rouge et Noir' as they said in the local tongue, or the 'Black and Red' in my own. And I think this pretty much sums up the bird in question, for the Black Redstart is characterised by these two simple and contrasting colours.

Sadly uncommon in the UK, its fantastic to be able to see them common as dirt on the continent and in being common and ubiquitous in towns they're also predictably very approachable. This post, as with almost all my efforts to photograph this species, concentrates on the juveniles, purely because they're more approachable...



This individual was a baby, who'd flown a nest built in the side of a rusting JCB-type digger, which was a particularly cool nest site and something I didn't take full advantage of with the photos. What I did take advantage of though was the approachable nature of the bird at hand, if you look at the eye you can see the hillside reflected there...



I also found a rather attractive one in Suburban Argentieres (if it has suburbs, I mean its smaller than my local park), part of a family of three youngsters being fed by an adult. This was particularly cute but never happened close enough to me for a shot, so I made do with some portraits...



That characteristic upright chat stance...



Anyhow a lovely bird and one particularly close to my heart. Next time I won't do a bird at all, but I will do the closest thing to one... :D

'Le Animaux des Alps'- The Crag Martinis

Baby birds often have different names to their parents, like goslings. Or pufflings. So why don't we extrapolate the trend to include the world's favourite Hirrudines; Crag Martins?

Yea so I figured, given that I was quite close to Italy, I would add 'i' to the end of the word. So young Martins are actually 'Martinis', and no they weren't in the least bit shaken by my presence. Nor were they stirred.

They had in fact just fledged, but being lazy they'd only got as far as the shutters below the rafters they came from. So I climbed a wall to watch what is one of the fastest food passes in nature. They're very quick. So what i've done here is accumilated the shots from 2 or 3 passes and laid them out so you can see the intricacies of an act that can't take more than a second. So the parents must be pretty awesome flyers. First the wee baba starts to call. A lot...



...Then the adult comes in, like a little missle (Missile? Doesn't even sound accurate!)...



...Then the food pass, notice the baby seems to be concentrating on something else...



...then over and out...



...and the great thing is this was taken all taking place as the people bought their bread underneath. They must've thought I was mad...

'Le Animaux des Alps'- Fur coats and Handbags

Or 'The Life and Times of Luis Suarez', he's the most obnoxious little bastard at the moment isn't he? Still, let's not dwell on such things, let's move onto an altogether more appealing little rodent...no not Danny Alexander ('Ginger Rodent', according to Harriet Harman. Pretty funny for an MP to be honest) but the rather adorable Alpine Marmot.

I like to think of them as terrestrial beavers, they're about the same size and have quite a few resemblances in the way the body is made up. They're one of those staples of the upland grasslands, a bit like...err..grass? But they're a bit more dynamic than grass, and they're quite comical at times. Especially with their rather comedic lolloping gait...



...but the most interesting thing about them is their social structure. They have a matriachal female who breeds on behalf of the group, harrassing the other females into miscarrying (bit grim eh?) so as there's no conflicting interests. They also have sentries too, who'll stay out the burrow and make amazingly loud whistling noises until the others are safely tucked away...



...and as for any queries as to what they eat...



...see what I mean about the beaverishness...?



...and the 'handbags'...



...and enjoying the vista in the harsh morning's sun...



...and an amazingly close pair, sitting out on a rock in the afternoon...



...you could just cuddle them, couldn't you...?

(but you wouldn't would you? They've probably got icky little lice and rabies and mingin' stuff like that.)



...yea they're pretty awesome animals...



..but that's yer lot, I can't be bothered editing anymore. So next time we've got some lovely wee boidies for you to look at, cant be having with all these mammals... :)

'Le Animaux des Alps'- Goats on the Edge

When the Spanish Armada sailed in the 1600s the crew, being a forward thinking bunch, packed not simply just food but also livestock. In fact, they took with them a huge number of goats. This meant that when they were pushed north, they took the goats north too. This meant when the ships were wrecked off the Scottish coast, the goats were wrecked too. Goats are famously hardy, so there's now a sizeable feral population in localised areas, such as Colonsay.

These are now seen almost as semi-wild, and it is testimony to the hardy and adaptable model that is the Goat's body that they can thrive in so many different environments, including central Manchester where they make a delicious curry. But aside this they have also colonised the high mountains, including the Alps. In fact there are two Goat species in the Alps, the Chamois and the Alpine Ibex, the latter being larger with huge sexually dimorphic horns.

And to live up high they have to be expert climbers, if only there were some way of conveying how sure-footed they were on scree and boulder, perhaps some kind of well-known phrase? Alas I cannot think of one, but suffice to say that south of Croix du Bonhomme there is a steep slope of gravel and muck, and i've seen an Ibex climb it...



...Yep that preamble really was just to get to the idea that i've seen an Ibex. Well I'm quite excited about it so that's pretty brief, in comparison to what I want to say about Ibex. Next question is 'did you get any photos, Joe?' Answer: 'Hmmmm...define 'photos' '. What I mean by this is that the Ibex arrived at the Col at teatime. As a storm set in. So photography wasn't a real option.

Not close up, anyhow. That shot before was of one we chanced upon on our way up to Bonhomme. I think I best explain what Bonhomme is first, its a refuge. Which basically means its a hut which has beds and food in it. And imagine our surprise as, half way through tea, four Ibex appeared on the horizon. It was speckling rain and the sky was the colour of the slate beneath my feet as I clambered up to get a view of the goats. An idea came to me; what about Black and White? Well I switched onto full BW and shot a couple of frames...



...not bad...but i'd much rather be closer to em! But still there's something vaguely atmospheric about these types of shots, at least they kinda show off the hardships of life in the high mountains...



...and in a way i'm quite pleased with these shots, so I returned to my food with renewed gusto...



...next time, some shots of one of my favourite small rodents (and its no longer Luis Suarez!)