Living World Images

My Blog is Dood !!

2007-07-17T16:31:00.000Z

Well, Living World Images is not quite dead but it ain't 'arf sick! and definitely not living...... it's been like this for some weeks now, so apologies to the few interested bloggers who occasionally tune in.

It's stopped uploading images, which is not good for a primarily photographic blogsite. Doctors will be working day and night on the resurrection once they get round to it.

See you on the website. Steve.

Orchid hunting in Kent and Hampshire

2007-05-30T11:02:00.001Z

It's that lush time of year again. It's good to see life in the woods and fields flourishing after recent rains broke the unseasonal eight week spring drought that gripped most of the UK. Not that we're complaining; eight weeks of good weather in Britain is almost unheard of, especially in spring and needs to be appreciated while it lasts. Wildlife doesn't seem to have suffered much from the warm dry conditions though and although the tops of hills like the Mendips looked worryingly parched and browning at the end of April, they were back to their normal forty shades of green by mid May.

Last week I spent two sunny days in Hampshire and Kent looking for some of our rarer orchid species. Chappett's Copse in Hampshire is the best site for the rare and graceful Sword-Leaved Helleborine. I met the Hampshire Wildlife Trust warden just after I arrived. He was doing a count of the flower spikes and was pleased with the slightly increased numbers on last year. He was a mine of useful information and pointed out other orchids (Fly, White and Bird's Nest) too.

The Weird and Wonderful Woolpacks

2007-02-22T14:17:00.000Z

'The Wool Packs' is the name on the Ordance Survey map for a troop of gritstone tors on the southern edge of Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire Peak District. Seen from a distance, you can understand how their smooth, rounded forms might have suggested sacks of wool in times when shepherding dominated the local economy. But a closer exploration reveals a maze of extraordinary natural sculptures, wrought by the elements over millenia to resemble human, animal or abstract forms, giving rise to the area's other, more humorous names of 'The Mushroom Garden' and 'Whipsnade' (that's a zoo, for all you non-UK residents!).

As a walker round these moors, you may know of these stones, because the rough but well trodden path that skirts the Kinder plateau passes right through the Wool Packs, to the left of the area shown above, on the way from Crowden Tower to Pym Chair. You may be intrigued by the towering monoliths on either side of the path as you pass through but you would be well rewarded by pausing here for a while if the weather permits. Take time to wander slowly through this magical maze; develop your feel for shape and texture; see with a Stone-Age eye; a sculptors perception of form. In fact, the sculptor Henry Moore came here seeking inspiration and photographed these stones himself. He once commented that 'there are universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off '.

The Wool Packs are fashioned from the rocks of the Kinder plateau; hard bedded Namurian sandstones called Millstone Grit, laid down 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous era by a vast river delta, disgorging its sand and quartz, eroded from ancient mountain chains, over hundreds of square miles of what is now Wales and Northern England. The Kinder grits were from the delta mouth, where fast flowing rivers dropped their heavier particles which consolidated to form a hard, coarse stone, rough to the touch and containing large crystals of milky white quartz.

The rough surface of the weathered Kinder Grits -

As the great river brought succeeding coarse and fine material down to the delta over the ages, it formed layers of what became harder and softer rock. A consequence of this is that the Grit weathers unevenly along its planes and joints as you can see in many of the sculptures in the Wool Packs, like this enigmatic Easter Island figure.

The hard, horizontal strata of Millstone Grits on the level Kinder plateau are impervious to water, making the plateau poorly drained. The surface of the moor is covered with a blanket of peat many feet thick, laid down during the warm, wet Boreal period after the last ice-age (climate change comes and goes), which supports an upland heath flora of heather and bilberry with some coarse grasses. The peat is dissected by deep drainage channels called groughs, up to three metres deep, separated by vegetation capped crests called haggs, so that what appears, from a distance, to be a flat landscape can make for very strenuous walking, over wave upon wave of soggy peat.

This monumental pair of sculptures stand in a sedge filled pool of water.

Wind and rain, ice and baking sun play their part in shaping these rocks but it is probable that ice-ages played their part too as did the slow etching of acid water leaching slowly through the peat and chemically weathering the rocks below. The peat is receding now (and has been since obsevations began), due to factors such as pollution, trampling, climate change and just the fact that the peat is not being replaced and the Wool Packs seem to be emerging, fully formed, from their shrinking blanket of peat. So were they weathered beneath the peat or were they very much like this before the peat blanket built up around them after the last ice-age? Whatever the case, slow but powerful forces have worked on these rocks to produce an astonishing range of sculptural forms.

Pigs?

Texture

Sky and shadow

The Moat Stone

The Moat Stone stands in a matte-black pool of dried peat. When I was young, it reliably sat in a shallow moat of water, like some public work of art in a city square but it has silted up in recent years and is usually dry, even after prolonged heavy rain. Perhaps the National Trust should reinstate the moat, or should nature be left to run its course and form a covering of grasses, leaving future generations to puzzle at the name?

Not surprisingly, Stone Age man hunted here, as witnessed by the arrowheads and stone tools that have been found around Kinder, but strangely there is no evidence of any settlement. Our paleolithic ancestors, who possessed a spiritual awareness of stone and landscape, would have been awed by the symbolism of the Wool Packs and the 'otherworldliness' of Kinder. It's possible they thought it too sacred a place to live.

It remains a very special place today. Inside a radius of sixty miles of Kinder live something like a quarter of the population of the UK and yet you can come up here at dawn and be alone for hours with just a few grouse and mountain hares for company and little to disturb the silence but the bubbling call of the curlew and soughing of wind amongst the stones.

The 'butt end' of the Wool Packs gives way to an apparently flat moorscape, in reality gouged by deep drainage channels or 'groughs'.

The exotic horizon of the Wool Packs overlooks the distant Pennine Way snaking down into Edale from Hog's Back.

As you might have realised by now, the Wool Packs is one of my favourite places. The area is accessible from Edale, between Sheffield and Manchester and there is a rail service between those cities that stops at Edale station, so you could opt to leave only green footprints! It's a 400 m climb to the Kinder plateau. The easiest, though longest, way is to follow the Pennine Way, Britain's first long distance national trail, diverting past Noe Stool and Pym Chair from below Hog's Back once you're out of the valley. Grindsbrook and Crowden Brook are spectacular alternatives or avoid the river valleys altogether and ascend via Grindslow Knoll.

Norway New Year

2007-01-05T18:42:00.000Z

We greeted 2007 in beautiful Norway, in the Jotunheimen National Park ski resort of Beitostollen. I had some fanciful notions of photographing Moose but soon realised that no Elk with any self respect would go near a ski resort. Wildlife photographs of any sort are zero in fact because: I succumbed to the seasonal temptations of gross over-indulgence; I cracked my rib just climbing onto a pair of skis; and we were only there for a short time. What pathetic excuses!

Cliff, Marianne, John, Jos (partner-in-law) and Jane. What a great bunch of in-laws!

We had a great time though and more snow than I've seen for decades so it was a good opportunity to practice photographing the white stuff.

Global warming hits Norway

Children are at home on skis soon after they walk, but sometimes need a little help from dad!

Wheareas some visitors look curiously out of place!

QED - visitor on the left, Norwegian on the right.

It's great to see real snow again

Winter rill

Barn

Red barn

Redefining the road

Fascinating to be in a country used to harsh winters. It's business as usual after a few feet of snow in the frozen North; out with the skis and on with the studded tyres and off you go. We saw cars driving up 1 in 8 roads of sheet ice with little trouble. Back in London, half an inch of snow brings the whole road and transport system to a halt and fills the newspapers with embarassing headlines and excuses but of course that's because we get 'the wrong kind of snow' as one transport spokesman famously put it.

First, find your car

Don't forget to let the cat out

When the weathers this cold there's only one place to be

Or save the Krona and enjoy a meal at home

Happy Healthy Prosperous and Peaceful New Year to ALL

Steve

Autumn musings

2006-11-15T17:43:00.000Z

Autumn is a good time of year for taking stock of photographs and life in general. Shorter days mean less time behind the camera but more time for refining and reviewing; so here is a refined selection of clicheed images of the season from the LWI archive and some verbal padding about the much undervalued fungus family.

Autumn is about contrasts. Light and the return of darkness, colour and monochrome, piercing sunshine some days and grey murky mists the next, melancholy and joy, reflection and forward looking. As the sun dips towards the horizon, sunlight becomes softer, warmer in tone and more revealing and the 'sweet light' of morning and evening, so prized by photographers in the summer months, can last throughout the day.

Colour briefly paints the landscape as the leaves die and fall. Fungi lift their fruiting heads above the leaf litter giving splashes of colour and interest to the dim woodland floor.

Fly agaric Amanita muscari are always found close to pine or birch. It was birch for these handsome chaps near Silchester in Hampshire, the biggest examples I've seen at 16cm tall and the same across.

Fungi often grow in the company of just one or two species of plant and it is now accepted that most land plants have a dual relationship with fungi. This has long been recognised in orchids but applies to most other plants, whose wellbeing depends on association with fungal partners. What we see emerging from the leaf litter is just the reproductive part of a much larger organism under the surface, the mycelium. These mycelia form an intimate relationship with tree roots called mycorrhizas. Some even grow inside the cells of roots, others form a close sheath around them and from there send out thread-like hyphae that invade the surrounding soil, gathering nitrates and phosphates from decaying leaves. These nutients are then absorbed by the tree roots. In fact it is fungi that do the job we used to think root hairs did.

What does the fungus get out of it? It gets the leaves and their nutrients and the shade and humidity provided by woodland but with other plants the benefits for the fungus are less obvious. Orchids, for example don't seem to give anything back to their fungal partners and could be defined as parasites on fungi. We usually think of fungi as parasitic organisms so it's quite refreshing to think of something as beautiful as orchids parasitising mushrooms.

The Panther Cap is a less flashy agaric than Amanita

Ceps or 'Penny Bun' Boletus edulis

Sunlight sets the beech woods aflame.

Stinkhorn ...................................................... and Dryad's Saddle

Stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus, attracts flies to its unpleasantly smelly head. They distribute the fungal spores by feeding off the gooey slime and getting covered in it in the process. They completely clean off this mucus in a short time, leaving a white spongey head. The fruit body emerges from a hen's egg sized structure called a volva (get's very suggestive doesn't it!) and grows at an astonishing rate of 8-10 cm in half an hour. This is not growth as such, but the rapid expansion of the honeycomb structure of the shaft as it bursts out of its 'egg'.

Watcher of the woods.

Autumn path

Sea Buckthorn berries develop on the shrub's branches

Profuse haws are said to herald a harsh winter but this has not been true for many years in England

Shadows lengthen

Evening mist gathers in the water meadows of Bodiam in Kent

Happy musing and best wishes to all, Steve.

Samaria Gorge - the easy way!

2006-09-20T10:51:00.000Z

The Samaria gorge is a 16 km cleft, cut deep into the Lefka Ori, the high White Mountains of south-west Crete. It starts life as a typical river-gouged valley, eroding the massive north face of Gingilos (2080 m/6280 ft) and broadening as it falls but narrows dramatically within a few kilometers of the sea.

Jos and I were staying in the tiny coastal village of Loutro, impossibly pretty and with the bonus of having no roads at all so there are no cars or motorbikes. You get there by boat or you walk over rugged cliff paths and that, to us, makes it wonderful. Loutro is the only port of call in the ferry journey from Ayia Roumeli at the mouth of the Samaria gorge and Chora Sfakion, where a road comes down from the north, so almost everyone that walks Samaria has to make the boat trip.

Loutro

We had both walked Samaria before but whereas Jos had completed the whole thing, I had some unfinished business with the place. I'd taken my two sons there in early May of 1988. Dan was nine at the time and Andrew only six. Conditions then were cool, well cold really, with fine drizzle at the start, quite different from the intense sunshine we were expecting but we bravely plunged down the Xiloskalo pathway into the mighty depths of the gorge, intending to maybe reach the village or have a look at the 'Iron Gates' and then climb back to the car.

Looking back now I see that this plan was a little ambitious. The path descends an amazing 1000m/3,300ft in the first two kilometers and the boys and I had walked around four kilometers before the sky blackened and thunder echoed from the slopes of mighty Gingilos. I remember eating our little picnic under a huge boulder before trudging back up the winding path to the plateau. To put it into context, I'd made my boys walk the equivalent of down Snowdon, Wales' highest mountain to sea level and back up again. They slept well that night.

Sunday September 10th 2006 was different though. We had that intense sunshine I'd hoped for in '88 and no car waiting at the top. We'd got here by boat, bus and taxi, setting off at 5.30 am and after a quick, untypically Greek breakfast in the untypically Greek cafeteria at the head of the gorge, we headed over the rim of the Omalos plain and down the 'wooden staircase' of Xiloskalo.

The obligatory pose at Omalos with Gingilos behind. It's all downhill from here (well, almost).

The first few kilometers of the route feel like the Alps. The air is clear and cool and the path descends sharply through fragrant woods of Calabrian pine but the well built kalderimi, the old track between Omalos on the high plain and the eponymous village of Samaria, zigzagging across the mountainside, makes the descent comfortable.

Down the Xyloskalo.

Samaria is one of the world's great walks and many people come to Crete with this walk as their prime goal. Still more discover the walk when they arrive on the island and realise they can do it without special clothing or equipment or even much walking experience. Most get bused to Xyloskalo around dawn from their hotels or holiday lets and pour into the gorge as the sun rises over Omalos.

On an average day in summer, two or three thousand walkers pass through the gorge but if you start walking slightly later (we started at 10.15) you miss the crowds and it seems too, that Sunday is a quiet day, as Jos and I had the place to ouselves for the first couple of hours.

Calabrian pines clothe the steep slopes

Yours truly singing selections from The Sound of Music in Greek

Jos rescues my already broken 1 dioptre specs from a size 10 walking boot crush injury

The sport of spurious cairn building flourishes in Samaria

A fellow walker takes a photobreak amongst the cairns

Walls in the village of Samaria, halfway to the sea

Samaria village makes for a natural break in the hike, about halfway to the sea, with tables for picnics, spring water and squat toilets (filthy) for the brave or desperate. Cute little Agrimi, wild Cretan goats or Kri-kri, hang around the resting visitors hoping for scraps of food and looking anything but wild. The villagers were moved out when the gorge became a national park (nice) and their place taken by park rangers and wardens, who monitor the progress and behaviour of gorge walkers and offer help and first aid to the needy.

Young Agrimi or Cretan mountain goat at Samaria village

Cameras at ten paces!

After Samaria village the gorge levels out but then begins to narrow. Perpendicular cliffs rising over 300 m (1000 ft) squeeze the river into a narrow channel, which is impassable in winter, causing the gorge to be closed from the end of October until May but even during summer there is the possibility of flash floods. In fact several walkers perished when they were washed out to sea in the summer of 1993.

The cliffs close in

Stratified limestone walls worn smooth by the winter torrents

Heading towards the narrow Sideroportes or 'Iron Gates' ------------------- An 8 m tree clings to the sheer, mineral painted rock face

The Sideroportes or 'Iron Gates' form the dramatic narrow entrance to the upper gorge from the sea and are probably so-called from the rust (and cobalt blue) staining of their vertical walls.

Upstream from the Sideroportes

Some writers claim that the walls are little more than 2 m apart at their narrowest and you can almost touch them with your finger tips. Our experiment, involving a time-delay shutter and a very risky dash through a rocky riverbed, shows this to be an exaggeration. (PS this is take two)

We make it about 4 metres

After 16 km of gorge, there is a 2 km walk to the little port of Ayia Roumeli, whose sole reason for being seems to be to cater for the cohorts of Samarians desperate for food, drink and if they miss the last boat, accommodation. There are no good roads from Roumeli back to Hania and the north of Crete so most walkers have to catch the ferry to Chora Sfakion, where buses wait to take them back over the mountains.

Feeling pretty good after a rough 18km walk and pretty pleased with ourselves too, Jos and I settled into a nice taverna with a prime view of the harbour quay and its fascinating parade of Samaria walkers. We ordered a couple of big beers, some kalamari and a Greek salad and spent a mellow hour or so waiting for the ferry to take us along the coast to sleepy little Loutro.

That's the boat on the horizon

This walking gives one an appetite

The day's Samarians waiting to be rescued

Orchid hunting - frogs and bogs, lizards and little green men.

2006-08-24T10:32:00.000Z

It's been three months since I posted anything on LWI, mostly because we moved house in May and it took an astonishing ten weeks to get broadband connected at the new address. I don't want to go into the sordid details of why it took so long as it makes my mercury rise; let's just say I'm left with a scarred-for-life hatred of Tiscali, BT and Indian call centres - but now we're back on-line so let's see some more living world!

We had a great summer here until the beginning of August with a seven week span of hot, dry weather and I used these incredibly rare atmospheric conditions to work on my stock of orchid photographs. It's good to have a clear goal when you're out with the cameras and whether you find what you're looking for or not doesn't really matter because you see plenty of other interesting subjects in the search and, as they say, the pleasure is in the chase.

Man Orchids

One of the first orchids I photographed this year was the Man Orchid on the North Downs near Kemsing. It's latin name is Orchis anthropophora, which means 'man bearing' after the little hooded mannikins that hang facing outwards from the flower spike. It's a rarity, mostly confined to the South East corner of England and becoming rarer even here as suitable habitats disappear.

In the UK, this is the most man-like orchid we have, though if we're honest, the men look more like dolls or little boys. But there is a European species of orchid that takes the prize for macho and that's Orchis italica, the Italian Orchid, Wavy-leaved Monkey Orchid or Naked Man Orchid. Here's a shot of a wonderful specimen I took in the Mediterranean island of Corfu some years ago:-

Let's look at those florets in more detail:-

Our little green man looks a little shy and withering next to the flambuoyant, exhibitionist 'Italian' flower doesn't he?. I'm afraid (in this case) the Italian lays the greater claim to the name Man Orchid.

In European countries, where both species grow, common names more closely reflect the flower's appearance. So our Man Orchid is called Puppenorchis (doll orchid) or Ohnhorn (without horn) in German, L'homme pendu (the hanging man) in French and the delightful Ballerino in Italian. The Wavy-leaved Monkey is called Knabenkraut (boyweed) in German, Orchis Ondule (undulating orchid) in French and Uomo Nudo (naked man) in Italian.

The completely coincidental resemblance of orchid flower parts to human figures, other animals or body parts, especially sexual, has made orchids the subject of intense fascination since at least Mediaeval times and no other group of plants has been so avidly sought out or collected. The ancient 'doctrine of signatures' ensured great attention to these plants because, as well as the flowers' talented mimicry, the rhizomes of several species resemble testacles, fingers and so-on, so that the plants were considered useful by herbalists for a whole range of ailments from physical to mental.

In fact the word 'orchid' means testacle in Greek, ancient and modern, which means you have to be very careful what you answer when orchid hunting in Greece and asked by the land-owner what you're looking for! Probably best to say 'antho' (flower).

Lizard Orchid

The links golf courses bordering the coast near the Kent town of Sandwich are good sites for the Lizard orchid and there were several hundred growing in 'the rough' when I visited in June. The Lizard is a robust plant with helmeted florets like the Man Orchid. They don't look much like lizards except for the long ribbon like 'tail' in place of 'legs', really an elongated central petal lobe with the smaller lobes making the 'arms'.

A spectacular plant, very rare though locally common and making a comeback in a few sites in England but their greenish overall colour makes them difficult to spot unless you know what to look for.

Frog Orchid

It's hard to see the frog in a Frog Orchid but it's there if you use some imagination. This unusually dense and robust flower spike was photographed at Noar Hill reserve in Hampshire.

Bog Orchid

The tiny Bog Orchid is one of our rarest species and the New Forest is now just about the only place to find this tiny plant in the South of the UK. It is more widespread in Scotland and Ireland but is everywhere disappearing. One of the hardest British plants to find at 2-4 inches tall, it grows in wet sphagnum bogs, usually close to streams so you're guaranteed to get wet in the attempt! It has tiny green-winged florets, which need close inspection to appreciate.

Bee Orchid

The Bee Orchid is much commoner than any of the above species but nevertheless has a touch of the exotic. These flowers were growing just a few yards from the M25 London orbital road at Ramney Marsh in Essex.

Stigmas of mature flowers resemble a duck's head. The pollinia, two sacks-like organs carrying pollen, can be seen in the image above on the 'breast' of the imaginary duck but the fact that they are stuck to it, rather than hanging free to be picked up by passing insects (as in the out-of-focus flower in the background), means that this flower has self-pollinated.

The flower bears some resemblance to a bee and is said to be designed to fool male bumble bees into mating with the flower before real female bees make an appearance in Spring. The flower's pollinia stick to the bee while he is being hoodwinked and successful pollination depends on him enjoying the experience enough to try it on with another Bee Orchid flower and depositing the pollinia on that flower's stigma. But it seems that male bees are not that desperate or at least are not fooled twice, as it is also claimed that British flowers are largely self-pollinated.

Lastly, this is the view from the Man Orchid site at Eastdown looking towards the farm at Magpie Bottom. Chalk landscape at its most appealing.

Best wishes to all. Steve.

TIKAL - Stunning remains of a Mayan city state.

2006-03-18T17:09:00.000Z

Tikal is the gem of all Mayan ruins in Central America, so despite Jos and I having only a few days in the Cayo district of Belize, we felt we just had to grab the opportunity to get to grips with some Maya history and travel across the border to Guatemala, if only for a day. Besides, we'd had a whole day to recover from the cave trip (see ATM post), relaxing in the sun beside Phyllis Lane's spectacular jungle pool at Ek Tun and were now pretty much (and who wouldn't be?) ready for anything.

A warm 'Evian' pool all to yourselves is an ideal stress buster.

After an interesting border crossing and three hour drive into Guatemala, we met our guide, Louis, an energetic and knowledgeable retired accountant, who now made a good living showing travellers around Tikal. We soon discovered that he was a very well respected Tikal guide and we were lucky to have him all to ourselves for the day. The point was brought home when we came across guides around the park with twenty or so attention seeking tourists to look after!

Lucky too that Louis happened to be a keen naturalist and eager to show us some of the wildlife of Tikal's pristine rain forest when he found out I was a photographer. He worked out an itinerary for us, maximising our chances of spotting wildlife and minimising the number of fellow tourists we would see - all good stuff. First off, after the essential look at the visitors centre and a visit to a local cantina to book a late chicken lunch, we headed for some small lakes with interesting signage:

With his ancient binoculars, Louis spotted a female croc amongst the reeds nursing seven strangely cute, grinning babies on her back. I managed to fire off some reasonable shots but all against the light and obscured to some extent by the reed stems. I would have liked to have got closer, preferably from the other side of the lake but that didn't seem possible and besides, she had a very large mouth and very sharp teeth and, like most mothers, female crocs get very protective!

Louis reckoned the mother would have chased the male out of the pond when the eggs were laid, because although a female croc makes a caring parent, males have no parental instinct and look upon their offspring as nothing more than a tasty snack. So for sake of the kids, dad has to go!

'Don't mess with mamma'

In the next pond, the surface covered by water hyacinth, a turtle the size of a dinner plate, basked motionless in the sun.

Whilst on the banks, a small party of colourful Grey-necked Wood Rails wandered right by us, as if oblivious to our presence.

So in the first half hour or so, Louis had delighted us by finding some very interesting animals. If things carried on this way, we might not have time to see much in the way of ruins but luckily (?) things calmed down as we walked from the lakes!

The first temple we came across was Temple V. As you can see from the steps on the left, it's a steep climb to the observation platform at the top but the view from up there over the forest canopy made it worth the effort.

Temple V. The steps are much steeper than they look in this wideangle view. Below is Jos carefully picking her way down, always trickier than going up. Apparently lots of people have been injured doing this, at least one fatally, but Jos didn't know that at the time!

This view of the corner of a Temple shows the pyramid's massive limestone construction.

The next major series of temples was in the 'Lost World' complex, a series of recently excavated plazas and temples, some still partly shrouded in tree roots.

Pyramid in the 'Lost World' complex.

Temple IV, the tallest in Tikal at 64 metres, was the next to climb, with spectacular views over the forest canopy from the top chamber. As well as their symbolic functions of power and religion, these temples were built to observe the motion of the stars and the planets, to reinforce the sophisticated and remarkably accurate Mayan calendar.

T4 was built around 741 AD and it is a tribute to its builders and architects that the structure remains in such a good state and amazing to think that such a colossal building could be 'lost' for centuries, swallowed up by the jungle. But the fact is, all the structures visible today were completely covered by vegetation up to the middle of last century and have been painstakingly restored over decades to something resembling their original state.

Looking out from the top chamber of Temple IV, you have a commanding view over Tikal National Park and the landscape beyond.

Temple III from the same viewpoint on Temple IV as above.

The highlight of any visit to Tikal has to be the Great Plaza, the ancient centre of ceremonial activity in the city for a thousand years. And whereas most visitors see the GP first, our wily guide took us to it last, in the mid-afternoon, when most of the day's tourists were on their way back to Tikal's landing strip for the flight home. So there were only maybe half a dozen people in the entire space, allowing us to soak up the wonderful positive atmosphere of the place. It is one of the great spaces of the world, yet with an 'otherworldness' about it. Easy to see why it was chosen for the film Star Wars to represent another planet.

Jos and Louis approaching the steps to the Great Plaza.

The eastern end of the Plaza is formed by the well proportioned Temple I, overlooking a level grassed area about the size of a football field. The space is dotted with stelae and circular altars carved with images of Tikal's ruling elite.

Temple I from the observation room of Temple II, our third climb of the day.

The North Acropolis

The North Acropolis dominates one side of the Great Plaza. It is a hugely complex structure consisting of layer upon layer of successive structures, each one built to cover the last. There are about a hundred structures beneath the present twelve temples.

Temple I, dominating the Great Plaza, is emblematic of Tikal.

Temple I and skyscape from Temple II.

After five hours and something like four miles of walking around just a few of Tikal's treasures and a glimpse of its wildlife, we headed back to the cantina where, as Louis said, we 'had a date with a piece of chicken' (delicious it was too!).

Later outside the cantina, I was photographing a wonderful bird, the Oropendula (not a wonderful photograph though) when Louis spotted a troup of Coatimundi foraging in the undergrowth near the road. Their proper name is 'Southern ring-tailed Coati' but none of this group had ringed tails. They were lovely to photograph though, in the dim light of the forest and made a satisfying end to our Tikal trip.

No jaguars, but a troop of coatimundi round the day off nicely.

Tikal is a huge site covering around thirty square kilometers of city ruins, only a fraction of which have been teased from the clutches of the jungle. Jos and I only had a small taste of Tikal and less than that of Guatemala but we both thought it would be good to come back when we had more time to explore. Ah! so much to see, so little time!

Have a look at the Tikal website if you want more information at:

http://www.tikalpark.com/acropolis.htm

and if you're interested in staying at Ek Tun, see Phyllis Lane's website at:

http://www.ektunbelize.com/

and thanks to Louis.

'El guido'

Best regards, Steve.

Glover's Reef - life (for a week) on a coral island.

2006-02-24T21:35:00.000Z

45 km off the coast of Belize lies the extensive coral atoll of Glover's Reef, named after John Glover, one of the original 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. On the eastern flank of the atoll, a group of tiny islands rise a few metres above the surf pounded reef rim and one of these, Northeast Caye (pronounced key), became our home for six days in January.

Your stay on the island is at Glover's Atoll 'Resort', run by the Lomont family for close on forty years. The parenthesis on the word 'resort' is also used on the Glover's website, because this is not the kind of set up that many people would expect from a 'resort'. It's more like comfortable but basic beach bumming than a hotel, although to be fair, most people that come here are pretty clued up about what to expect and get on quite happily with the shared composting toilet and cold showers, no electricity, bottled water and 'through-the-wall' air conditioning. And there's not a trouser press in sight!

We had a simple over-the-water thatched cabin, which was surprisingly spacious , with a double bed and a hammock and a table with cooking gear, pots and pans. These remained unused on the table all week though, as we took the soft (and sensible) option and had all our meals cooked for us in the 'restaurant'. Breeze, the dive master, head chef and general main-man on the island and his three man team cooked great food for us. Breakfast, lunch and a good dinner, usually of fresh seafood from conch or fresh fish to lobster.

We would sit at the back door in the evening, with our preprandial ration of Belikin beer, watching the shoals of tiny fish or maybe a passing ray or pipefish or just admiring the view (above).

The 'shacks' are supported on piles driven into the shallow lagoon. They have survived two hurricanes!
These are our nearest neighbours.

Most people come to the Glover's Reef Marine Reserve to dive or snorkel in the pristine coral reefs here, as the atoll is the most biologically diverse in the Caribbean. It is so valuable a resource that the atoll was made a World Heritage Site in 1996. The map below (courtesy of the Glover's website) shows just how huge the atoll is and gives you some idea of the range of diving opportunities that exist on the reef.

The dry reef crest marked on the map above Northeast Caye is not as dry as you might expect. Jos and I set off on a 'walk' and soon discovered that the crest is really just below the waves and that anything like nine miles would be a bit too far at such a slow paddle. We managed a few hundred yards.

There were less submerged areas of reef but these proved difficult walking too. Opportunistic mangrove seedlings sprouted amongst the coral debris. It was clear they would not survive.

Breeze the 'head honcho' with Shane lugging air.

Jos and I don't dive, so we snorkelled close to the island and found plenty to keep us happy. Just to widen our territory, we had a two-man kayak for the week and had great fun learning to stay upright in the choppy waters and jumping back in after a dive. By the end of the stay we were still some way off being expert but we found that kayaking is a great way to tone up the pecs.

Jos paddles the kayak over the aquamarine lagoon while I relax in the back.

I had a waterproof housing for Canon Powershot I'd brought with me and soon found out just how difficult it is to take photographs while you're bobbing around in the waves. There was a strong wind blowing for most of the time we were on the reef, so I never managed to try underwater photography in calm conditions. Here are just a few shots:

A beautifully camouflaged and beautifully marked flatfish. Virtually invisible when not swimming.

Northeast Caye covers around three acres, big enough for it to take all of fifteen minutes to walk around at a slow pace. Jos and I used to do a circuit of the island before beer in the evening, clockwise mostly but anticlockwise some evenings for a change of scene. The interior of the island is covered with dense coconut forest, dotted here and there with broadleaf trees; cool, dark and mysterious.

Nuciferous nursery

Scuttling along the forest floor, especially at night were hundreds of shells, home to hermit crabs from fist size to impossibly tiny. Below is one we kidnapped and took back to the shack to photograph. Lucky for him we were eating at the canteen!

Lizards too were common but difficult to photograph by stalking. The best method was to stay in one place, say on a sun lounger with a book(Jurassic Park works best for me) and a camera and read nonchalantly. Reptilian curiosity would eventually get the better of them and they would come out of hiding to see what you were doing and allow a chameleon pace approach from behind the lens.

Ospreys are said to breed on each of the islands around the atoll, plucking fish straight from the ocean with those sharp grabhooks. This is one of our resident pair taking off after eating breakfast on the reef just before we went to the canteen for ours.

And everywhere on the island are conch shells, mostly the remains of past meals and put to good use as path edging, cabin decoration and even a novelty hand basin tap (although you can't get the soap to lather in the brackish water).

Some creatures live on smaller 'islands'. While we were tidying the beach one afternoon as part of our contribution to the running of the island, we picked up a hair spray can, which had been adopted by a colony of stalked barnacles as their floating home. We wondered how long they had lived on their enamelled can, how far they had travelled and what storms they had endured. Perhaps the cans motto helped.

By the way, we returned them to the sea to continue their Odyssey

Of course all good holidays come to an end but our stay on Glover's was only the first week of two in Belize. Nevertheless we were sad to leave such a beautiful 'Robinson Crusoe' island after the great time we'd had and all the wonderful people we met, who were tremendous fun and really made the whole experience very special.

If you would like to stay at Glover's, visit their website at http://www.glovers.com.bz/accomodations.html

Actun Tunichil Muknal - probably the most exciting ATM on the planet!

2006-02-18T13:41:00.000Z

We're back from our trip to Belize in Central America and the one word that sums it up is WOW! We spent one week on Glover's Atoll out in the (normally) sunny Caribbean and the second week at Ek Tun, Phyllis Lane's unique jungle retreat in the Cayo District.

While we were staying at Ek Tun, we took the chance to explore one of the archaeological wonders of the Mayan world, the cave system of Actun Tunichil Muknal or 'Cave of the Stone Sepulchre', which is every bit as thrilling as the name suggests. In caverns deep within the mountainside lie hundreds of beautifully crafted Mayan pottery artefacts, littering the floor for tens of metres, from small drinking cups to large storage vessels, alongside stark evidence of human sacrifice in the pierced skulls and other skeletal remains lying amongst the pottery.

The entrance to the cave, shown below, is an hour-glass shaped 'hole-in-the-wall' through which the fully fledged Roaring Creek River plunges into the sunlight from a deep, turquiose pool.

Entrance cavern to ATM

We signed up with PACZ tours, run by Emilio Awe (pronounced Ah-way), who according to National Geographic in their 'Place of Fright' article about this cave, knows more than anyone else about the caves around these parts and runs expert guided adventure trips to the cave.

Our guides, Patrick and Carlos certainly knew their stuff. We were quite a large party, nine in all, as prolonged heavy rains in the Cayo district had made the cave impassable for over a week, so we were one of the first groups lucky enough to go down there for many days. Patrick asked us to introduce ourselves and say where we were from, then promptly ignored our names and addressed us by our home town. I was London for the day and there was Arizona, Seattle and Miss Canada. Jos became Mother for some reason, probably because Mrs London would have been too confusing.

Our fellowship gets a briefing from Patrick Warrior. That's Jos, my wife, on the right. When this guy speaks, you listen!

Patrick and Carlos made it clear that we were about to enter a priceless and unique living museum and that we were extremely privileged to be doing it. ' We don't want nobody messing up our heritage, there's too many artefacts get'n broken down there' Carlos had railed in the van on the two hour drive to the forest trail. We thought he was being a little over the top at the time but later we understood exactly why.

Patrick told us he used to train British squaddies in jungle survival, taking them out to live out in the wild for two weeks at a time. He stopped every few hundred yards to tell us some plant lore such as which leaf to eat to combat malaria or how to waterproof your skin or how to build a shelter for the night out of palm leaves. We felt we were in safe hands on our yomp towards the underworld.

Team work. We quickly learnt to look out for each other on this hazardous adventure.

Not that you just drive up to the front door. The journey to the cave is a one hour route march at a brisk pace along steamy jungle trails, punctuated by three tricky river crossings over the youthful and vigorous Roaring Creek River, which varies in depth from navel to chest deep depending on how far your navel or chest is from your feet. Oh, and the river bed is covered with big unstable boulders, which are difficult to see in the rushing waters. I have to admit, I feared for my camera equipment.

A swim across the entrance pool is our first introduction to life underground.

We arrived at the cave mouth in good shape though and after a light lunch, a thorough briefing and a traditional Belizean bonding ceremony hosted by Patrick, we were ready to enter the 'Place of Fright'. You can judge from the photographs how fast Roaring Creek flows from the cave and it's pretty much like that for the half kilometre we had to swim, wade or paddle against it underground.

We passed through the dreaded 'breakdown', a section of collapsed cave roof quite easily, taking care of ourselves and each other. It's a good thing we hadn't read the National Geographic article beforehand, which perhaps overdramatises the risk:

“breakdown”—a talus pile of collapsed boulders, here half-submerged in the wall-to-wall stream. I made my way over this chaos gingerly: The grotto was filled with limestone fins and prongs so sharp that a slip or fall might gash you to the bone.

OK, so we were lucky!

We passed through successive wide and narrow sections of the cave, always following the river upstream, sometimes passing bare rock walls and sometimes enchanting caverns decked with stalactite ceilings, flowstone walls and stalagmite floors.

The ancient dry cave system, site of the Maya artefacts, displays many speliological wonders.

After about an hour making our way steadily upstream, Carlos pointed out a huge rock on our right and behind it a ledge, perhaps ten feet above the river. We would have waded straight past it as many cave explorers had in the past. Patrick told us the river cave went on for another two kilometres but contained no Mayan artefacts. In 1986 however, a team led by Oxford archaeologist Thomas Miller decided to investigate the cave beyond this ledge and 'hit the jackpot'.

We climbed up the rock onto the smooth, sloping ledge and immediately saw pottery artefacts embedded in the flowstone of the cave floor. We were told to abandon our shoes here and walk the rest of the way in socks or barefoot, to make us more careful and aware of where we were treading amongst the precious and fragile artefects on the cave floor. We left the river behind and tiptoed our way into this dry cave system, much older than the one we had just left and eerily quiet after the comforting companionship of the river.

We walked through majestic caverns, like the aptly named 'cathedral', a huge open space, floored with undulating dams and pools of creamy flowstone and walled with rows of organ pipe columns where stalactites and stalagmites coalesce.

We tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Mayans to come deep into the earth like this, with only pine torches to light the way and keep them from absolute and terrifying darkness.

'The Cathedral', a chamber of truly epic proportions.

Beyond this great chamber, the passage narrowed again and at the top of an upward gradient of rippled flowstone, we came upon hundreds of pottery artefacts and an atmosphere of hushed reverence came over the party.

Parts of the cave floor were so thickly strewn with pottery remains, it was a real effort to avoid treading on them by accident. There was good incentive to be very careful however as our guides comfortingly told us 'You break anything, we leave you down here.' Nobody broke anything!

'Arizona' examines a group of Maya ceramic shards.

All the pottery artefacts were either broken, or pierced at the base, sometimes with neat keyhole shapes, supposedly to release the spirit of the vessel. Many were completely smashed and none were completely intact. They are thought to have contained food offerings for the 'Lords of Death''; spirits of 'Xibalba', the Mayan underworld that was connected to the living world through these fearful caves and when their ritualistic function was fulfilled, they were ceremonially 'killed'.

Patrick explains the history and use of these pots.

A group of larger broken vessels.

Large vessel with animal motif on the shoulder.

These pottery vessels are a tribute to the skill of the artesans who made them. Patrick told us they were made by the coil method, yet they were smooth and perfectly symmetrical. Even the biggest pots, perhaps half a metre in diameter, were only 3 or 4 mm thick and of even thickness from base to neck. Anyone who has tried coiling even a small pot will know how amazing that is.

This group includes the largest vessel we saw.

A captivating story teller and his awed pupils. What he's talking about is shown next.

Ceramic vessels were not the only thing to be ceremonially killed in these caves. Lying amongst the pottery, a total of fourteen human skeletons have been discovered, from adults ranging in age from twenty to forty, a child of around seven, to six infants under three. They were slaughtered, possibly with stone axes, as evidenced by their broken skulls and laid in travertine pools in the flowstone of the cave floor.

All this happened around 1200 years ago, so long in fact that the human and ceramic artefacts have, over the centuries, been calcified by the lime rich waters of the cave, preserving the organic remains in far better condition than would normally be the case.

This skull, calcified in the flowstone floor of the cave, gazes upward into the darkness.

The same skull from a different angle, showing it's flattened forehead. Notice the light in the eye from the
hole in the right side of the cranium.

Carlos talks about a group of heavily calcified artefacts.

The climax of our journey came at the end of a narrowing section of cave, where a ladder led up to another ledge, perhaps fifteen feet above the rough floor. We climbed this cautiously, one at a time and scrambled into a further rough, narrow tunnel, strewn with huge fallen rocks. This curved to the right for a short distance and ended in an enclosed shrine-like chamber. Carlos shone his torch at the floor, revealing a remarkable sight. The near complete skeleton of a young woman lay before a smooth flowstone 'altar', her bones heavily calcified and seeming to dissolve into her stone deathbed. It was a breathtaking vision and one which none of us are likely to forget in a hurry.

Skeleton 13 belonged to a young female, sacrificed to the gods and left lying in a shallow pool.

The way into ATM is also the way out and we picked our way back through the dry cave system, collecting our shoes at the ledge before rejoining the river cave. Going with the flow made the return journey much easier than fighting the current on the way in. Within an hour we were at the breakdown and soon after saw the welcome glow of daylight on the walls of the lofty entrance cavern.

It was early evening when we followed the Roaring Creek out from its cool turquoise entrance pool and emerged into the warm forest, buzzing with light and life. It felt good to be back in the land of the living and even a pleasure to ford the river three times on the three mile hike back to the bus. There was a new spring in our steps after our day in the underworld.

On the way back we retrace our steps through the ornate and colourful 'Cathedral'

Postscript:

In other, more 'developed' countries, a comfortable dry tunnel would no doubt have been blasted through from the 'show caves' to the Visitors Centre and they'd be putting a thousand visitors a day through here along roped walkways to look at what remained of the artefacts after the museums had taken their cut. Of course, that would make the visit more comfortable and accessible but you'd miss out on a wonderful life enhancing adventure and the sense of awe and mystery that touched us would feel somewhat 'canned' if you felt it at all.

Belize allows only small groups led by specially trained guides into ATM, maybe 10 to 20 a day when conditions allow. The guides are fully conscious of their responsibility to preserve the integrity of both the natural caves and their archaeological contents.

If you intend to visit ATM, you need to be fit and unlike the National Geographic author, able to swim. It's also useful to be free of phobias such as confined spaces , creepy crawlies and the dark, though a day on this tour will probably cure you of all of them. As Patrick said to encourage us before we set off on the jungle hike, 'We don't want no wimps on this trip'.

We can thoroughly recommend the Pacz Tours operation, which is based in San Ignacio and if you're lucky enough to be led by Patrick and Carlos, you're in for a real treat.

Back to Summer

2006-01-14T15:18:00.000Z

Just to beat the London winter blues, I thought I'd put up a few shots of British butterflies as a sort of nostalgic glimpse of last summer.

Jos and I are off to Belize in Central America later in the week to spend one week on a coral atoll and a week in the jungle, so the butterflies should be more dramatic in the next posting. Hope you enjoy these native beauties though!

Brimstone on Devil's Bit Scabious

Brimstone in flight

Dark Green Fritillary on Viper's Bugloss

Gatekeeper on Gorse

Common Blue

Large Skipper

Marbled White

Meadow Brown

Small Copper female

Small Copper male

Small Heath at rest in chalk quarry

Small Skipper

Small White

Painted Lady

Green Veined White

Animal Humour or Humorous Animals?

2005-11-24T12:47:00.000Z

Before the animals, here's a nice Autumnal image taken in the Chiltern Hills on November 16th at the end of longest 'Indian summer' I can remember. As well as the usual insomniac butterflies and out of season spring flowers, the most anachronistic behaviour I came across this autumn was on a warm day in the New Forest on November 9th, when I saw a mated pair of Darter dragonflies ovipositing in a shallow pool. Someone tell them it's six weeks to Christmas! The leaves have usually just about fallen by this time but there's still plenty of green on these beeches. We're having our first winter gales one week later though; the temperature has dropped about twelve degrees and snow is on the way, so I reckon the picture would be very different now.

Burnham Beeches, Chilterns.

So how about animal humour? We love to identify with and relate emotionally to animals and there are whole industries from Disney to greetings cards to cuddly toys that make big money from our eagerness to ascribe human values to them.

Ask any pet owner whether their dog/budgie/hamster/iguana/stick insect has a sense of humour and they'll say 'of course they do' and probably relate a few whacky antics performed by Spot/Joey/Amanda/Errol/Rod to back it up. But are they misguided? Many scientists would claim that humans are prone to anthropomorphise animal behaviour and attribute human qualities to non human animals so their answer would be 'no', people observe the instinctive behaviour of animals and interpret it according to their wide ranging human emotions.

The OED defines humour as 'the condition of being amusing or comic' so you could say lots of animals, because they amuse us and make us smile or laugh, are humorous. Sense of humour is more difficult though; defined as 'the ability to perceive or express humour or take a joke' it suggests that the being, human or animal, making us smile or laugh needs to know that they're doing it or having it done to them.

Let's have a look at some amusing animals to lighten up the discussion.

Ewe with stile

Now here's sheep No 317 climbing a Derbyshire stile. You often see spring lambs doing this sort of thing but not their parents, so why was she up there? Perhaps it was fun in an ovine sort of way. It certainly made us laugh.

Nanny on drums

And this Greek goat is probably just balanced on an old oil drum because goats love to climb and that makes them feel good and that makes us smile. We smile at the 'capricious' behaviour but we also smile at the self satisfaction of the goat , because we imagine doing that ourselves and the feeling it would bring. And does the goat sense that we empathise with its pleasure? Humorous, yes but sense of humour?

Scientists, even behavioural scientists, would say that when animals do something that we find humorous, they probably get rewarded in various ways that reinforce that pattern of behaviour. This can be anything from 'who's a clever boy then' (mmm, not bad) to petting (better) to food treats (now you're talking!). Of course circuses, dolphinariums and zoos capitalise on conditioning animals like this to train them to make us laugh in exchange for money.

The orang-utan below in Kuala Lumpur Bird Park in Malaysia is one such example. He's only very young and that makes him naturally playful and easier to train. You may say he'd be better off in his native jungle in Malaysian Borneo* and I would agree but the relationship between him and his trainer is hilarious and he seems to enjoy the whole performance.

It seems too as though he knows he's making the audience laugh even though his prime motive may be to get some treats in the form of positive social interaction with his trainer and hopefully some food, which will make him feel good. Isn't that what we do too when we use humour? We make people smile so that they feel good about us so that we feel good ourselves and maybe get something positive in return, like a kind word, maybe free drink or even an interesting night out.

A look at some birds:

Ducks are always good for laughs and their calls often sound like laughter, which reinforces the humorous image.

Shoveler duck female bathing.

Mallard on a fence.

Geese and swans don't raise as many smiles as ducks; but then again ............

Canada Goose head on.

Bewick's Swan preening, (please don't attempt this in public).

And penguins are guaranteed to raise a smile. They are the only bird to walk upright on two legs so are easy to empathise with.

African Penguin

When we come down the evolutionary scale, we still find humorous characters, like this cricket. Of course, the 'smile' on his face is just formed by the hinge between his mandibles and the top of his head but we're conditioned to see some kind of jovial Jiminy cricket Walt Disney character, an image that's hard to shift even when we know we're looking at a humourless insect.

Field cricket

This Common Darter dragonfly's face has the same effect, looking like some kind of puckish fairy but the smile is a 'crocodiles smile' and could well be the last thing the dragonfly's insect prey sees.

Common Darter

Finally, more mildly humorous animals. They speak for themselves but one of the most powerful ways we anthropomorphise animals is to put words into their mouths, so please supply your own captions.

Cow ''------ -------- ------- --------- -------''
Starling ''---- ----------''

''---- --- ----- ******* ------''

''Personally I don't think animals have a sense of humour at all''

Next week, 'do all humans have a sense of humour?'

* Bird Park Zoo says that these OUs are orphans and works towards reintroducing them to their native habitat.

Breakfast visitor

2005-11-08T12:18:00.000Z

Checking my emails around 8:30 this morning, I glanced out of the window to see this splendid young dog-fox prowling the shed roofs at the bottom of the terraced gardens. He was trying to find a quiet way down without risking the horrors of the Woolwich Road roundabout or the noisy car body repair yard and was having trouble doing it, which gave me time to strap a 100-400mm telephoto lens to the camera and get some shots.

Nice to see a fox in such good condition and unusual to catch one up so late. Most of the foxes we see round here are laid out by the side of the A102 looking distinctly dead. I've seen as many as four corpses on this one road between Greenwich and the M25, ten miles away.

I've put these shots straight up without any Photoshop enhancement as they're pretty good in the raw state but if the post digital darkroom stuff is a big improvement, I'll substitute.

Finally, LWI is now back in business (thanks Dan) after some upload gremlins hijacked the site shortly after our hard drive became terminally ill from a viral attack and had to be wiped and reborn. Must be the time of year!

Best regards to all, Steve.

Dungeness

2005-09-25T16:32:00.000Z

At first sight, Dungeness, tagged on to the south Kent coast and one of the largest expanses of shingle in the world, seems a pretty inhospitable place compared to the rolling charms of the Downs and the Weald. In reality though, this is a fascinating and fragile landscape, with an eclectic but thriving community of fishermen, artists and city escapees, a haven for wildlife and a great destination for a day out, with two pubs (great fish 'n chips), a gallery, a lighthouse to look round and the little Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway to take a ride on.

In fact 'The Dunge' has two lighthouses for good measure and two rather hard to ignore nuclear power stations, an old 1965 Magnox plant and a newer Advanced Gas Cooled (AGR) 1987 model, right by the sea and sitting on one of the most unstable and shifting stretches of coastline in the UK. So why put them here?

The old and new lighthouses with the old and new Dungeness A and B reactors in the background.

If we had to build nuclear power plants, and back in the sixties we thought we did, Dungeness was probably chosen as a good site because it's a) remote ie. not many people live around here to kick up a political stink, b) the land is cheap ie. you can't farm shingle and not so many people want to live on it (though lots do) and c) although it's remote, it's not so remote that you have to pump electricity hundreds of miles to where it's needed in big cities like London.

Dungeness A's twin reactor houses.

Derek Jarman's Garden and Found Art.

One of Dungeness's most famous residents was film director, artist and gardener, Derek Jarman, who lived in the charming Prospect Cottage (below). He created his witty and wonderful 'Atomic Garden' out of a bewildering variety of sculptural objects found on the beach along with plants that tolerate the salt laden winds and drought conditions found on this seaside shingle. His inspiration was the Dungeness landscape itself, for you don't have to look far to find aesthetic associations between native plants and the flints and shells, flotsam and junk that strew the peninsula. Derek died in 1994 but his garden is lovingly maintained and is not so much open to the public as, like most of the houses in Dungeness, completely open plan.

Prospect Cottage and the approach to Derek Jarman's garden.

Three views of Derek Jarman's garden in April.

I don't know whether DJ started a fashion for 'objets trouvees' or 'found art' around these parts but many of the cottages have flotsam and jetsam sculptures adorning their gardens and there are quite a few humorous examples dotted around the shingle banks. For instance, this highly functional 'double wind vane and old boots'. The 'arms' are aligned east to west and the boots point south, so a westerley blowing today.

Double wind vane and old boots.

Or this gruesome dead hand, straight from Davey Jones' locker and still grasping it's last drink (Coke presumably).

'Iron Bru anyone?'

The most elaborate sculpture I saw on my last visit in September was this figure with a feathered hat, complemented nicely by a backdrop of nuclear reactor buildings.

Standing figure with AGRs.

Some Flora and Fauna.

Much of the Dungeness dunes make up a National Nature Reserve and there is an RSPB bird reserve centred around flooded gravel pits in the middle of the spit. The shingle supports a surprising variety of plant life, with good growths of Burnet Rose, bearing scented flowers of the palest lemon in May and June. This beautiful shingle hugging shrub has a lethal array of thorns but when the petals drop, they reveal a crimson ovary arrayed with the soft gold of the withered stigma and stamens on a 'starfish' of sepals.

Burnet Rose flower, Dungeness.

Burnet rose stamens and ovary.

The tiny Zebra jumping spider hunts for insect prey amongst the stones.

Zebra jumping spider.

Vegetation tends to grow in isolated islands surrounded by expanses of bare shingle. These island pockets become richer in nutrients as plants die off and produce water retentive humous, encouraging a wider variety of species colonisation. Gorse and red valerian are quite common and look very attractive against the shingle in June. Shingle gardens have become quite fashionable in recent times and find their inspiration in landscapes like Dungeness.

Red Valerian and shingle.

One of the first forms of plant life to colonise the shingle as with many other inhospitable environments are lichens and many quite large areas of shingle are cloaked with soft grey Cladonia species of lichen, possibly C. portentosa. Amongst these grow rue whose rust red flower spikes make a pleasing contrast amonst the grey. These two plants probably form the basis of the more species rich islands of vegetation.

Lichen and Rue; pioneering colonisers of the shingle.

The Lighthouses.

The new lighthouse is apparently the latest in a succession of six, built to replace earlier lights left landlocked by the growing shingle spit.

The latest Dungeness light.

The new light and old lookout shed.

Next to the old lighthouse, which is built in traditional style and is open to the public, is the round house, which is the base structure of an earlier light.

Old lighthouse, round house and coast guard cottages.

Fishing.

There is an active fishing port at Dungeness point and in the absence of anything resembling a proper harbour, the boats, quite big some of them, are hauled up the steep shingle banks on iron sleds. The photograph below was shot through the rusted hulk of an old tractor, probably used to haul up the boats many years ago and now left as a reminder of times past for the men and women who daily work this beach; left to slowly dissolve into the sea. Any other place and the old tractor would be considered an eyesore and quite rightly, dragged off to a scrap yard but here it seems to fit into the landscape and somehow looks right.

Fishing boat beached at Dungeness point.

Tough shingle coloniser; the Sea Kale.

The shingle banks closest to the sea are a hostile environment for most plants and few are able to survive here. One that flourishes however is Sea Kale, a relative of the cabbage and a huge plant over a metre across when fully grown, with wavy edged blue-green leaves, sending up large flower spikes crowned with masses of white flowers.

Sea Kale seedling sprouting through fisherman's plastic matting.

Sea Kale and the man made artifacts of Dungeness point.

A few hundred years ago, the whole of Dungeness point was under the sea and although it has an air of permanance now, it is constantly being reshaped by coastal drift. Because of this, there is a continuous stream of heavy lorries collecting shingle from the east coast of the spit and recycling it on the west coast to help maintain the structure. Worthwhile when there are a total of four nuclear reactors to safeguard and with global warming a reality and a rise in sea levels on the cards, those lorries are going to be kept pretty busy.

At Dungeness you can't help thinking that in a few more hundred years this will all be under the sea again and all its history and industry will disappear along with its wildlife. Let's hope that those reactors are cleaned up in time.

Table Mountain Dassies and Cape Town Harbour Seals.

2005-09-09T18:02:00.000Z

Dassie or Rock Hyrax (Procavia capensis).

'If you get up Table Mountain, don't forget to bring back a picture of a Dassie for me' said my son Dan, who'd visited Cape Town a couple of years previously.

So when we arrived in Cape Town in June this year from the Madikwe bush camp (see post), and Jos was settling into the first day of her Dentomaxillofacial Radiology (head & neck stuff) conference at the ICC , I decided to tackle the mountain the hard way, on foot. It was a wonderful climb, through unfamiliar and fascinating Fynbos vegetation, with great views over the city, sea and mountains beyond; great views that is, below the cloud base at about 700 metres. Above that was a world of swirling mists and dripping cliff faces up to the 'Lost World' of the summit plateau at over 1000 metres.

Viewed from Cape Town, Table Mountain looks like a completely flat plateau but the apparently flat top really consists of tortuous, Fynbos covered rock formations of weather sculpted, lichen encrusted limestone; a veritable Japanese garden. Approaching the top cableway station from Platteklip gorge, my ascent route, I spotted my first Dassie, the handsome, smiling chap below.

Dassie or Rock Hyrax at top cable car station, Table Mountain.

I had an extreme wideangle (10-22mm) lens fitted to the camera, normally quite unsuitable for photographing small timid mammals, so should I swap it for a telephoto and risk him running off?

The Dassie (locally pronounced Dussie) or Rock Hyrax has poor body temperature regulation and becomes quite sluggish in the cool conditions experienced in winter at this altitude, so I decided to stick with the wideangle and after a few exploratory exposures from a distance to test his reactions, it became clear that he was not going to move in a hurry, so I tentatively moved in closer. In fact the above shot was taken with the lens not much more than a foot (0.3 metres) from his nose and I must say I was impressed by his trusting nature.

Close by was a Hyrax family group feeding on vegetation at the plateau edge. Here are a couple of the youngsters.

Young Rock Hyrax showing us his interesting dentition.

Portrait of young Rock Hyrax.

Looking out over a break in the clouds from the 'flat top' of Table Mountain.

Surprisingly, the closest relative of the Rock Hyrax in the animal kingdom is the elephant, in terms of its genotype, parts of its skeletal anatomy and more obviously, its dentition. Like the elephant, the Hyrax has no primary incisors but has modified secondary incisors. These are developed to the extreme in the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) in the huge tusks but are enlarged in adult Hyraxes too, as you can see in the mist shrouded individual below. Of course, the differences between Loxodonta and Procavia are rather pronounced too but it does demonstrate that genetics can throw up some intriguing ancestral connections.

Mature Rock Hyrax demonstrating principle phenotypic evidence of relation to Loxodonta africana (baby tusks).

Because they lack primary incisors, Hyraxes graze the Fynbos vegetation using the lateral teeth and take in food from the side of the mouth, as seen in the Dassie below, who's actually feeding and not taking a nap.

Hyrax feeding on Fynbos vegetation.

Goofy and comical though these animals may seem to us, we should resist the temptation to see them as an intermediate species on the evolutionary road to some future 'elephanthood'. They are well adapted to the harsh, mountainous landscapes in which they live and have a widespread distribution, from the southern tip of Africa to parts of the the Middle East.

Brief interlude:-

Conversation on Table Mountain with teenage American high school girls (AHSG's) encountering Dassies for the first time:

1st AHSG: 'Oh my God -- What the hell's THAT! Oh my God it's a huge RAT!'

2nd AHSG: 'Oh my God -- does it bite?'

3rd AHSG: ' Eeuugh -- Oh my GOD'

1st AHSG: 'Don't touch it'

2nd AHSG: 'Don't go near it'

3rd AHSG: ' OH MY GOD'

ST: ' It's a Rock Hyrax.'

1st AHSG: 'A what? ..... a HIGH RAT? Oh my Gaaaaaad''

ST: 'A Hyrax. They're related to elephants.'

1st AHSG: 'Elephants? Hey they're related to Elephants'

2nd AHSG: 'You don't say'

3rd AHSG: 'Does it bite?'

ST: 'It won't hurt you'

1st AHSG: 'Hey that's really cute'

2nd AHSG: 'Aww ain't that cute?'

3rd AHSG: 'Yeah look at its cute little eyes.'

1st AHSG: 'Hey thanks for tell'n us about the Hyrax thing mister.'

ST: 'Pleasure' - 'Bye'

End of brief interlude.

Cape Fur Seal (Arctocephalus pusillus).

Back down at sea level and intrigued by tales of seals in the harbour from fellow hotel guests, I set out for a stroll round the docks, expecting to see a couple of seal heads bobbing in the water and not much else. But as so often on this South Africa trip, the encounter exceded expectations and there were three seals hauled up on a jetty among the yachts, on custom made steps and in just the right poses for photographs. These shots are taken with a Canon 100-400 mm, forcibly hand held because I left my tripod back in the hotel room.

Having a good scratch! Cape Fur Seal, Cape Town harbour.

A tender fishy moment.

Male CFS portrait. Squinting and head rolling is more or less continuous.

Hydrodynamic female CFS . Notice the closeable nostrils, ear flaps, small eyes and mouth and slightly retrousee nose; ideal features for shearing through water at speed.

When I took my leave of the seals there was a small queue of people behind me waiting with their cameras and below, you can see just how confiding these animals are.

'Is this is my best side?'

Derbyshire walk with lead mine and cattle.

2005-09-01T18:45:00.000Z

Safaris in Derbyshire are just as much fun as the African ones but you don't get driven around the reserve, you have to use your own feet; but the big positive is a pub or tea room every few miles. We did a walk around the beautiful White Peak near Lathkill Dale last week. Here's an idea of some of the 'big game' we encountered.

Please don't lick that lens!

Love those freckles!

Come in No 5 - time for milking.

After a welcome pub lunch at the dubiously named 'Cock & Pullet' in the tiny upland hamlet of Sheldon we made a short detour to the nearby Magpie Mine, the best preserved lead mine in the county, built when the industry was at its height and in operation until the 1950's. The engine house and chimney are like a piece of classic Cornish scenery grafted into the Derbyshire landscape.

The Magpie Mine.

Engine house and chimney.

Shaft head winding gear.

After well earned tea and cakes in Monyash, we set off down Lathkill Dale, one of the most perfectly beautiful of limestone dales and one which itself, has a rich lead mining history. The eponymous river that usually runs through the dale's lower reaches had slowed to a trickle at best and was completely absent for most of the walk. The river disappears underground most summers as the water table sinks but according to English Nature, who manage the Lathkill Dale nature reserve, the duration of these dry periods is increasing. They are looking into ways of helping the river run again.

Jos in the normally dry canyon section of Lathkill Dale.

M A D I K W E Game Reserve, South Africa.

2005-08-22T15:20:00.000Z

In May this year, Jos and I spent five wonderful days in the Madikwe Game Reserve in the north of South Africa, close to the Botswana border. Madikwe was initiated in 1992 with the aim of benefitting local communities, among others, through sustainable wildlife tourism activities. It was stocked with imported game in the biggest translocation exercise ever undertaken, called Operation Phoenix. A staggering ten thousand animals of twenty seven species were brought here from other African reserves.

We stayed at Mosetlha bush camp, www.thebushcamp.com, a basic but comfortable and wholesome collection of open sided, twin bedded, wooden huts for a maximum of sixteen guests, where the emphasis is very much on providing an authentic bush experience. There is no electricity and you have bucket showers using hot water from a donkey boiler, but believe me it's great fun, the food is good and the rangers are real experts in bush lore.

Waterbuck female and young.

Of course, the reason for visiting any game reserve is (or should be) to see the wildlife and experience something of the interrelationships between the birds and animals, the vegetation and the landscape. Madikwe did not disappoint. We had nine game drives and a bush walk during our five night stay and each outing produced new and unexpected sightings. As Tabie our excellent young ranger said, every encounter is unique. The first evening for instance, we came across a fine herd of waterbuck, who seemed happy with our presence and gave me some good opportunities to try out the Canon 500mm f4 IS lens on my Benbo tripod and Wimberley head (in monopod mode, as it wasn't possible to open up a tripod on the back seat of the game vehicle without losing friends). More skittish animals would have made life much more difficult so I am grateful to this docile group and the soft evening light for giving me some very useful practice with the big and heavy 500. In fact I'm now a bit of a waterbuck fan. Below is Dad, wistfully chewing a blade of grass. Above is some of his family.

Waterbuck male.

That same evening, as we were having our first sunset stop for tea and biscuits (beer and crisps if you prefer), we were joined by this fearless black-backed jackal. He was hanging around in the hope of a free snack and howling to his shyer mate in the twilight. He got no handouts and eventually loped off, disappointed, into the sunset. Best not to get wild animals accustomed to seeing humans as a source of food was Tabie's advice. Photographically, the problem was getting far enough away from him with the 500mm lens, and the fast receding light levels. 1/50th second at f4 with a 500 is not good but the Image Stabilisation feature on the mighty 500 helps by boosting the shutter speed equivalent by a couple of stops or so, ie. around 1/200 to 250th. Nevertheless, most of the attempts were hopelessly blurred and the lucky shot below demonstrates the value of taking multiple exposures in tricky situations.

Black-backed Jackal

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The African wild dog is one of the star attractions of Madikwe. These dogs are pack animals and efficient hunters and despite their prodigious reproduction rate (females can give birth to sixteen or more pups in a single litter, the most of any mammal), they are an endangered species. They form close knit social groups, which hunt as a team and share the kill, even amongst sick or injured members of the pack. However, the cost of this intimacy is that diseases such as rabies and distemper quickly spread through the group and can wipe out a whole pack.

Wild dogs have voracious appetites, often kill twice a day and they prey on animals far bigger than themselves including adult breeding stock, so no game reserve can afford to have too many wild dogs around. Thus their activities are closely monitored and their numbers controlled if this is considered necessary. Notice that the dog in the shot below, that we encountered at dawn, is wearing a radio collar, used to track movements of the pack.

African Wild Dog male.

We came upon this battered old male some days later. He turned out to be badly injured and limped painfully off after the rest of his pack. They had killed a Kudu about a hundred yards away, had probably led him to it to feed and he was now resting and digesting.

African Wild Dog, old male.

Tabie, our ranger, disappeared into the dense bush, rifle in hand, looking for the kill. He led us to it on foot when he'd established that the pack had gone and it was safe for us to look. What you see in the photograph is what remained of a 160 Kg Kudu. Just a stripped skeleton and a few yards away, a cleaned hide. Tabie reckoned that the whole animal would have been devoured in around 20 minutes!

Alan, Jos, Romy and ex-Kudu.

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Red Haartebeest.

Haartebeest are frequent in Madikwe. They are said to be the fastest antelope. There are several subspecies, with a variety of colour and horn shape. This is the Red Haartebeest, which has lyre shaped horns.

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Dead Leadwood trees.

The skeletal remains of Leadwood trees are prominent in many areas of the reserve. They don't signify any sort of accelerated tree death, just that the Leadwood has very dense hard heartwood, which is resistant to fungal attack and can remain standing for fifty years after the death of the tree.

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Giraffes are unique and wonderful animals and it's something of a surprise on your first safari to see them looking around with their heads well above the tree tops.

They look strangely prehistoric and dinosaur like but perhaps that's because they are filling a similar ecological niche in an age of mammals that long necked reptiles did in the Cretaceous era. Or are they?

Long necked dinosaurs like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus certainly existed in the Cretaceous but current thinking suggests that in reality, they could not lift their heads more than a few feet above the line of the backbone; the vertebrae simply locked up before the head could be lifted any higher. So images of these animals browsing giraffe-like at tree top level are probably fanciful and scientists have always been uneasy with the problem of how a thirty ton reptile gets a blood supply to a brain fifteen feet above its body.

Giraffes have evolved a number of physical and physiological adaptations to enable them to live with their heads in the treetops. They have large hearts: 13 kg for an adult male, capable of producing a blood pressure 2-3 times that of humans to pump blood up to the head; an intricate network of valves in the blood vessels of the neck; blood vessels that can bypass the brain when the animal lowers its head to drink; oversized lungs to compensate for the large dead volume of air in the 12 foot trachea and erythrocytes (red blood cells) about a third the volume of those in humans to increase the efficiency of diffusion of oxygen in and out of the cell.

So with such a high degree of specialisation, we shouldn't wonder at the giraffe's lack of mammalian competition for browsing the topmost leaves of trees.

Female Giraffe browsing.

Frisky male assessing females readiness for mating (the sniff test).

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We stayed with this lioness for perhaps half a mile as she roamed the bush, mournfully calling for her cubs but we lost her in the thick bush before we found out whether or not she found them.

Lioness searching for cubs

This magnificent male lion had killed a baby giraffe the day before and was jealously guarding the carcass. He had charged our fellow Mosetlhans who got there just before us in their game vehicle and were still shaking when we arrived. Fortunately he settled down enough for some close observation but he was in thick bush, hence the slightly obscured view.

Lone male lion guarding giraffe kill.

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We came across a group of four enormous bull elephants rapidly consuming a grove of trees one morning. Madikwe has a large elephant population and plenty of tree and shrub rich savanna to support them.

Elephants eyelashes.

Looking for leopards after dusk one evening we came upon this elephant drinking at a waterhole about twenty metres away. A couple of preliminary shots with the 100-400mm zoom lens using flash produced predictable if disappointing results of a well lit, rather flat looking elephant on a pitch black background.

I got Tabie, our accommodating ranger, to experiment with shining his spotlight on the elephant and got some good exposures by whacking up the ISO speed on the Canon 20D from 100 to 1600, which gave a shutter speed of 1/30th second in the dim light. Just enough to hand hold with the lens steadied on the seat back. But the most interesting effect and the one that most captures the atmosphere of the occasion, was achieved by shining the light into the water to illuminate the ele' with ripple contours from the reflected light.

The passing White-Headed Duck was a bonus.

Elephant and duck. Madikwe waterhole. Dusk.

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Lilac-Breasted Rollers are quite common in Madikwe. The LBR has the most lovely combination of blues and browns on its back, tail and wing feathers, which contrast wonderfully with its rose and lilac breast. The bird below sat in a bush just a few feet away from the game vehicle one evening, enjoying the last rays of the sun and stayed there quite unconcerned as I took photographs.

Lilac-breasted Roller.

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The bush camp resident spider was this Golden Orb, whose web was around two metres across, anchored to points perhaps three metres apart. This is the female, who seems to have lost a couple of legs. The male is tiny in comparison and a dull brown colour. He sits on her back to mate, though getting there and getting away afterwards, is probably a perilous operation. The web consists of two kinds of silk, one yellow and one colourless, with a characteristic ball of yellow at the centre from which the spider gets its name. The mummified carcasses of its victims are strung out in vertical rows near the centre of the web. Some of these can be seen in the shot below.

Golden Orb Spider, female.

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The Kudu, one of the largest antelopes, has beautiful spiral horns, which can grow up to five feet in length. This handsome male has the characteristic facial markings, including three white spots on his cheeks.

The shot below and the earlier Waterbuck male, which are totally uncropped, show the value of using a Wimberley head (www.tripodhead.com ) with a heavy telephoto lens. When mounted on a properley balanced Wimberley, moving the camera and lens becomes completely effortless so it's easy to frame the subject exactly. This would be really awkward to do with a ball and socket or pan and tilt head, particularly with portrait views like these.

Kudu male.

Kudu male facial markings.

We met this female Kudu on a later drive. She has a lovely face too; and those ears! Clearly Kudu must be able to sense predators approaching from great distances, even at night.

Kudu female.

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Burchell's Zebra is recognisable by its alternate darker and lighter stripes towards the rump. According to Alan, a fellow guest, the males are black on white and the females are white on black. No trouble sexing zebras then!

Burchell's Zebra.

Burchell's Zebra foal.

Boulders Beach Penguin Colony, South Africa

2005-08-13T15:16:00.001Z

African or Jackass Penguin
Spheniscus demersus

Boulders Beach, south of Cape Town is home to a thriving colony of African penguins and it is quite a surprise to find what we think of as an Antarctic bird living quite successfully in the temperate climate of South Africa.

Boulders is a quiet seaside neighbourhood of Simon's Town on the Cape peninsula with some very desirable villas and bungalows overlooking the sea, many of whose gardens are now populated by pioneering penguins from the ever expanding colony on the beach. It is the only place where this endangered species is on the increase, though this is probably little consolation to the locals.

You can sense an uneasy relationship between the resident homeowners and the now protected colony. After all, how would you take to a bunch of penguins making nest scrapes in the lawns and borders of your garden? Added to that, the birds earned their former name of Jackass penguin from their call, which sounds very much like a braying donkey and because there are so many birds, goes on pretty much continuously, so imagine too living with a herd of agitated donkey impressionists at the bottom of the garden!

Having said all that, they are wonderfully cute and amusing, especially on their way to and from the sea and make great photographic subjects. And what's more important, they were here first!

At Boulders, there is a fenced reserve and a short series of wooden walkways over the rocks and dunes, so you get good access to the birds. It's a good idea, photographically, to get down to penguin level for the best shots and I found that lying flat out on the boards gave the best angle using the 100-400mm telephoto. This seemed to start a trend with some American visitors and before long we had a small gathering of prone penguin enthusiasts at the end of the walkway.

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Back from the sea. The second of the foursome shows signs of oiling.

They often seem surprisingly hesitant to enter the sea, paddling in the waves before taking the plunge just like we do, as if the water might be too cold for them; difficult to believe considering their efficient insulation. However, it was June (the equivalent of December in the Northern hemisphere) and the sea really was chilly. Looking at their comical antics on the beach it's hard to imagine that they turn into efficient fish hunting torpedos underwater.

Reluctant to take the plunge.

Fish hunting torpedo?

Crowded beach at Boulders.

'Braying' is used as a form of greeting and to strengthen the pair bond.

African penguins make devoted parents (and doting chicks).

Lizards, dragons and walking on water...... a visit to Thursley Common.

2005-08-04T03:12:00.000Z

Thursley Common in Surrey is one of the best sites in the UK for watching Odonata (dragonflies to you and me) with a species list of damsel and dragonflies numbering around twenty five out of a resident list of thirty eight for the UK and Ireland. They are here because an extensive area of small lakes, ponds and bogs provides good conditions for breeding, coupled with the mild climate and the rich and varied local ecosystem.

The reserve is managed by English Nature, who have built raised wooden duckboards over the marshy areas and some of the ponds, allowing good access to prime sites whilst keeping damage from enthusiastic nature lovers and their even more enthusiastic dogs to a minimum.

The duckboards provide popular basking areas for Common Lizards (Lacerta vivipara), which allow a surprisingly close approach before they scurry off between the boards to make their escape. They can be photographed at close quarters by slow stalking, avoiding any sudden movement and keeping a low profile, ideally lying flat on the boards and slithering forward, lizard like, after your intended subject. It by no means works every time but sometimes a lizard seems to find the experience of a camera lens approaching to within a few inches of its nose interesting enough to be worth sticking around. It's also worth noting that you may end up with a small crowd of interested onlookers behind you as you writhe about on the ground apparently photographing some wooden planks.

Common Lizard female.

The name Common Lizard probably arises from the fact that this species is more widespread than the only other British representative, the Sand Lizard (Lacerta agilis) but it has just struck me that the Common Lizard could be common on commons and that's where it gets it's name. Whatever the case, it is interesting that at Thursley, the lizards congregate around the damp marshy areas rather than on the dry heaths, their usual habitat, which make up the greater area of the reserve. It is possible that as well as the basking boards, the boggy areas provide a better supply of food in the form of insects, which also use the duckboards to bask in the sun.

Common lizard male.

The Thursley bogs are surrounded by an extensive area of heathland and forest based on the underlying Wealden sandstone and these areas too support an interesting variety of fauna and flora.

Paths through the drier areas are eroded to loose sand and these provide a breeding ground for mining bees and digger wasps. On hot summer days the sandier paths hum with thousands of tiny insects swarming just a few inches above the sand. Closer observation reveals them to be minute bees only 3 - 4 mm long, which feed on the heather of the heathlands and burrow into the loose sand along the pathways, presumably to nest and lay eggs. Mating activity can be frantic with clusters of bees rolling wildly around on the sand. These are known as mating balls and occur when a female, presumably emitting pheromones, attracts a whole gang of ambitious males (below) rather like frogs in the spawning season.

Bee 'mating ball'.

A definite highlight of Tuesday's visit to Thursley was photographing a Raft spider on the surface of one of the small pools at a damselfly kill. The Raft is one of the largest British spiders and certainly the most handsome, with an orange and brown body and green legs. It has hydrophobic (water repellent) hairs on its legs that enable it to move freely on the surface of the water where it catches prey that may have become trapped or waterlogged. The spider below is in the process of devouring a damselfly, which it has decapitated and in the first shot, you can just make out a thread of gossamer issuing from the spider's spinerette, which is also attached to the severed head. In the second shot it is just possible to see the damselfly's ghostly eyes and whitish toothed mask peering up from the below the water surface (to the right of the spiders right hind leg).

Raft spider with damselfly prey.

Raft spider at damselfly kill.

Incidentally, photographing the raft spider was a tricky business, which meant leaning precariously over the surface of one of the small pools from the soft spongey banks. To get the whole arachnid in focus, I needed to align the macro lens vertically with the water surface and within 30 cm (1 ft) or less of the subject. Try doing that with a spot two feet in front of you on a solid floor and you'll see the problem. Needless to say, it was impossible to hold this position for more than a few seconds (I should have kept up the Tai Chi lessons) so I used a small Gitzo tripod in monopod mode to stabilise the camera over the pond, whilst still hand holding it. I found that it was possible to judge what was going on in the viewfinder by looking down on it from quite a distance above and this made it possible to get the lens right down to its minimum focussing distance of 20 cm (8 inches).

Luckily the spider was too preoccupied with its prey to be spooked by my antics and was happily finishing its evening meal when I left and luckily too, I managed to keep myself and my valuable camera gear from a soaking.

As I mentioned, Thursley is noted for it's Odonata, so here are two examples of dragonflies and one damselfly taken last year on the reserve.

Mature female Keeled Skimmer dragonfly. The lovely shimmering gold of the mature female eventually fades to a brownish blue.

Male Black Darter.

The Black Darter is one of our smallest dragonflies and is not much bigger than the largest damselflies such as the Banded Demoiselle. It is altogether chunkier and more powerful however; its fast darting flight quite unlike the flitting flight of damselflies.

Small Red Damselfly male.

The Small Red is one of the rarer British damselflies, confined to a few sites in the south of England and differs from the more common Large Red by the absence of black markings on the abdomen and, with experienced observation, its smaller size.

Finally, from beauties to a definite beast, the Robber Fly, is quite common at Thursley. As you can judge from the larch cone on which it is perched, the Robber is one of our largest flies and not surprisingly it is a hunter. It preys on other insects and uses that dagger-like proboscis to pierce its victim and aspirate the body fluids. Which reminds me .... time for supper!

Robber Fly

The Banded Demoiselle

2005-07-27T16:13:00.000Z

The Banded Demoiselle has the grand Latin name of Calopterix splendens , an apt epithet for one of our most splendid insects. Male Demoiselles can be seen in large numbers along many slow flowing rivers and streams in southern Britain from the end of May to August. Their flashy barred wings, metallic blue-green bodies and flitting flight make them unmistakable and strangely reminiscent, in flight, of little blue helicopters.

The males compete for strategic perches along the river in the hope of mating with passing females but scarcity of suitable mates forces them to spend most of their time sparring with each other for territory. When a female flies by she is often chased by a crowd of optimistic males, despite the fact that she may be already mated or in the process of ovipositing.

Male demoiselles competing for perches.

Damselflies, the Zygoptera, are weaker in flight than their more powerful cousins, the dragonflies, the Anisoptera and command smaller territories in consequence. They have stiff bristles on their legs and these are held forward of the body in feeding flight in a sort of basket arrangement, which allows them to catch small insect prey on the wing.

Male Demoiselle.

Female Demoiselles are less flashy than the males but are nonetheless beautiful with polychrome green thorax and abdomen contrasting nicely with navy blue legs.

Female Demoiselle.

This mating position is called the wheel and is characteristic of damsel and dragonflies. The male grasps the female behind the head and tries to induce her to swing her abdomen into contact with his thorax to receive his spermatophore or sperm packet.

Copulating Demoiselles.

The butterfly-like flight is achieved by the extraordinary free rotation of the wings. The male below is coming in to land at his favourite spot.

Male Demoiselle

Summer on the River Lea, Essex.