Move Mountains

Pleased to see my image of Chrome and Parkhouse Hill published in the Travel section of Saturday's Guardian this week. 'Move Mountains' was a nice two page spread on walking off the UK's beaten tracks, suggesting you ditch overcrowded Mam Tor and the Great Ridge in the Derbyshire Peak District for the quieter challenges of these two wonderful Carboniferous limestone reef remnants.

Taken almost ten years ago on a clear evening walk with fabulous light in early September, I remember the joy I felt as the young climber, unknown to me, struck a perfect pose as he reached the summit of Parkhouse Hill.
Figures lend scale to the landscape and encourage us to become emotionally engaged and it's this that picture editors are increasingly looking for in landscape shots.

The Guardian also published an expanded web version of the article which you can see here.

Organic farming at 6,000 feet in the Himalayas of Northern India

The village of Supi high in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Uttarakhand region of Northern India, grows lush crops of wheat and barley in its south-facing terraced fields.

The crop is organic by necessity as no herbicides or pesticides are used and could not be afforded in any case. Consequently the fields are shared with wild flowers and insects, including bees and butterflies.

 Women collect fodder for their farm animals each morning, providing them with a rich and varied diet and 'weeding' the fields in the process.  The farm animals, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, are not eaten but provide milk or wool and manure, which is mixed with fallen leaves to spread on the land each year to put back what has been taken out.

Woman collecting fodder for her animals

Herbs and spices, garlic, cabbage and spinach are grown in smaller plots and gardens close to the house, so the totally vegetarian diet is varied and interesting, usually spicy and very Indian.

A woven basket of fodder ready to be carried home

There are no fences, private land or keep out notices so children walk to school along narrow field paths

Lichen Garden in the Temperate Rain Forests of New Zealand

Colourful lichen community on montane rocks of South Island New Zealand

The high alpine rain forests of South Island New Zealand are amongst the wettest places on earth with heavy rain for five days out of seven and annual rainfall ranging from five to eight metres!

The constant humidity provides perfect conditions for moisture loving plants like mosses, ferns and lichens.

Many rocks are covered with several species of lichen but the most eye-catching is undoubtedly the bright orange/red Xanthoria species pictured here. It seems to be displaced by more dominant lichen species as their colonies spread over the rock, providing a background to their more subdued palette of greens, greys and pinks. But the overall effect is a beautiful painterly abstract on the rock surface.

Sika Deer on Lundy

Lundy's sheltered east coast from above the little harbour

Exotic residents of a remote island


The wonderful island of Lundy, a granite bastion three miles long and up to half a mile wide, lies nine miles off the coast of north Devon at the boundary of the Bristol channel and the Atlantic ocean. From here due westward it is open ocean until the east coast of the USA; in fact, sticking to the same latitude, you would reach the cold north tip of Newfoundland, ice bound for half the year. Lundy's stunningly beautiful and heavily sculpted west coast is testimony to the erosive power of those relentless Atlantic breakers.

In striking contrast, the island's east coast is more sheltered from wind and waves and consequently has much richer and taller vegetation and it's here that a small colony of shy and elusive Sika deer can, with luck, be found.

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) are native to eastern Asia and were first brought to England in the 1860's. Seven Japanese Sika were released on Lundy in 1927 and a small herd, periodically subdued by culling, has lived on its sheltered eastern cliffs ever since.

We stayed on the island for three days in September and saw the deer on a walk along the bottom path that skirts the steep slopes of East Sidelands.

Sika are able to forage amongst dense vegetation and eat a wide variety of plants. The bracken of late summer provides cover for the deer, which are wary of humans, their only predator on the island and often rest under cover during the day, feeding in the early morning, evening and at night.

As it was late morning when we came across this small herd of perhaps a dozen hinds, calves and prickets (year old males) high above us on the cliff slope, we considered ourselves very lucky.

There is a strong bond between hinds and their calves

Unlike most other deer species, Sika often retain their spots into adulthood, although there is much variation in colour and some individuals, particularly stags, are a rather dark, plain brown. There was no stag amongst this group, just a couple of prickets, or one year old stags, which have single pronged antlers.

Sika hind on the boulder strewn cliffs

The Lundy Sika are reported to run away and hide when disturbed but this herd seemed to tolerate our presence quite happily, inspecting us from a safe distance at first before carrying on feeding.

As with most wildlife encounters, keeping quiet and staying still or moving very slowly often pays off with some enjoyable behavioural observation and rewarding photographs.

Hind and her calf taking a good look at the photographer

Two Big Dippers to Feed!

Dippers and the relentless search for food for two demanding offspring

The Nedd Fechan river in the Brecons is famous for its succession of lovely waterfalls, tumbling through steep wooded gorges of the Neath valley. The clean, fast flowing rivers here also provide ideal conditions for dippers, who hunt among the mossy stones and underwater, for caddis fly larvae and other invertebrate food. In late May I came across a parent bird working the river in an attempt to satisfy the hunger of its two fully fledged chicks.

The well-fed ever-hungry dipper chicks

Dippers are thrush size birds with chestnut brown back and distinctive white bib. They are often seen flying just above the river surface from one stony perch to another, bobbing vigorously as they land.

Dippers are one of the few birds that use their wings to effectively fly underwater but they also dive and walk along the river bed in search of prey.

Caddis fly larvae are a favourite source of food and great numbers need to be caught and prepared in the breeding season when the dipper parents have hungry mouths to feed.

Caddis fly larvae live under stones on the river bed and protect their soft bodies with a sheath of armour formed from small stones or pieces of twig and this protective coating needs to be removed to make the larva palatable to the chicks.

The dipper flicks the larva against a stone to deftly strip off the covering .....

......  and reveal the soft bodied insect within.

But despite just having been fed, the chick persists in demanding more food and receives a disapproving look from its exhausted parent who must dive straight back into the river. A look many human parents will empathise with!

Adonis the King of the Blues

Adonis blues at Rough Bank Butterfly Conservation reserve in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds

Adonis males on black knapweed flowers

I went to Rough Bank reserve near Stroud in mid July to look for its fabled Adonis, chalkhill and small blues and although it was a hot, sunny day, I must have been too early in the season and saw no blues at all, common, Adonis or otherwise. Rough Bank is called Nottingham Scrubs on the OS map, though it must be eighty miles from Nottingham, my old home town.

It is a beautiful area of steeply sloping flowery grassland in a deep Cotswold valley on calcareous oolitic limestone and was purchased by Butterfly Conservation, along with a few acres of unimproved pastureland, a few years ago. It will now be managed with butterflies in mind. Although it was disappointing to see no blues that day, there were plenty of  commoner browns, vanessids and whites on the site (see 'A Summer Meadow' in my video section),  so I resolved to come back later in the season when Adonis might have emerged.

There were plenty of second flight Adonis around when I revisited the site in mid August. I had only seen one or two fleeting glimpses of this stunningly coloured butterfly before, so I was thrilled there were so many around, perhaps twenty of thirty seen over a two hour visit.

The flash of heavenly blue, enhanced by a slight iridescence which gives the wings a luminous quality, is a breathtaking sight.

Common blue males are sometimes mistaken for Adonis but their lovely blue wings have a violet tinge and this is complicated by the fact that occasional Adonis males have a somewhat violet hue.

The diagnostic feature is in the white fringes of the wing, which are crossed by black markings in Adonis but are plain white in the common blue.

Two Adonis and a chalk hill blue 

The black and white fringes are also present in females, which greatly aids their identification.

Female Adonises are similar to other blue females but also have punctuated wing fringes

By the 1980's, the once common Adonis blue was rapidly dying out from most of its known localities. The irresistible beauty of the male's wings made this insect highly desirable to butterfly collectors from Victorian until recent times and vast numbers were taken in this way. The absence of rabbits due to the myxomatosis epidemic of the late twentieth century induced changes in the short grasslands essential to this butterfly's lifecycle and many of its habitats were being 'improved' i.e. disappearing, in the name of agriculture.

Adonis warming up at ground level

It was thought that Adonis might go extinct in Britain by the turn of the millennium, which would have been a tragedy and a disgrace. Conservation efforts since then and a better understanding of its ecological requirements, along with the return of rabbits, have seen a gradual improvement in the butterfly's fortunes and it seems to be making a comeback in many of its old haunts, though there are no grounds for complacency.

Magpie Riders

Taken close to home in Ashton Court just outside Bristol, red deer hinds were scouring the dry grassland for green shoots during the hot July weather of 2018. A couple of magpies were hitching rides on the deers' backs, looking out for insects kicked up by the hinds.

The does were being pestered by flies round their eyes and noses, which the magpies scared off, at least for a while. In fact you can see a small swarm of disturbed flies in this photograph and this is may explain why the deer tolerate these noisy birds hitching a ride.