About 1pm today a friend excitedly told me that a Beluga whale had been seen just down the road off Coal House Fort near Tilbury. I got less excited when I found out it was on the Kent side, but it was still a cetacean in the Thames, and an Arctic one at that! I…
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Back at the start of 2018 in was in the pond man lab experimenting with my photo aquarium set up. Its the 4th January and it was reasonably mild and my Water Spider Argyroneta aquatica was a bit active, so I popped it into the photo aquarium. for some shots. It climbed around the rush stems…
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A couple of weeks ago I was walking back from a local site when I spotted some ivy in flower. In September, Ivy Hedera helix is an important flower for many pollinating insects as it is one of the few sources of pollen and nectar around in autumn. I was looking for Ivy Bees, but…
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Back in May/June I had a number of froglets around my pond and some would sit for me nicely, so I thought I’d try some image stacks of them. (You can find out more about how I make these these stacks/stacked images here). I got some nice results: Of course I had a few failures…
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Back in late July the heatwave was in full swing, which had limited the amount of wildlife on show as the hot sun and dwindling water levels put pressure on many species. The crickets and grasshoppers were doing well and early one morning this speckled bush cricket seemed determined to pose for me. Its long…
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Living in South Essex I often look with green eyes at those in places like the highlands with pine martens and crested tit in the wilderness on their doorstep or in Norfolk with swallowtail butterflies and large areas of fen to explore, but looking objectively there are some good things to be found in Essex,…
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What is the UKs ‘best’ invertebrate? Its (just about still) Insect Week so I decided to try and find out. With 1000s if not 10,000s of species to choose from, it was not easy. This list would no doubt be different from any other person, and I tried to make sure I didn’t pick too…
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In the last few months I have posted a number of stacked images of live invertebrates (and occasionally vertebrates!) and people have asked two questions: 1. What is stacking/a stacked image? 2. How did you get a subject to sit still for 99+ shots? This blog should hopefully clear things up. What is a stacked…
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Last weekend I finally made it up to Norsey Wood to start my wood ant project. The bluebells have just started to flower, but to me they come second to my favourite forest flower, the wood anemone. I used my 300mm and teleconvertor for this shot, which helped get the nice clean background. It was…
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