Red deer stags resting after heavy rain at Ashton Court Bristol

Ashton Court is very close to my home in Bristol and has two separate deer parks with large herds of red and fallow deer. Roe deer come into the unenclosed sections to the park, so all three native British species can be seen here.

Walking back home after a wet morning walk in the park, I came upon the older males of the red herd sitting out the rain. For most of the summer the stags hang out in a male creche, growing their antlers ready for the autumn rut. These are old nine, ten and eleven pointer alpha males with massive antlers, so the photographic intention was to show those magnificent antlers to best effect against the grey skies. An unmissable opportunity as they usually have their heads down feeding or are standing and quite unapproachable.

After a slow and cautious approach on foot, they seemed not to be worried by my intrusion, so I lay in the wet grass and inched forward, commando style, until their antlers were silhouetted against the sky, perhaps ten feet from the closest male. Even when I stood up to leave, cautiously I must admit, they remained calm and rested.

Red deer are not normally aggressive but the thought of the lethal damage those antlers could inflict made this a thrilling and quite humbling experience.

Amazing Acetabularia - the limits of unicellular life?

Acetabularia mediterranea in shallow water along the fringes of Jezero Malo on Mljet

Acetabularia acetabulum

What comes to mind when you think of a single-celled organism? Something microscopically small like an amoeba or an alga perhaps, with a single nucleus surrounded by cytoplasm and a cell wall? 

How about a complex structure with a stem and a shallow bowl-shaped cap in a delicate eau-de-nil, from one to ten centimetres tall? 

It seems incredible but that's acetabularia, a marine alga which has a single nucleus controlling a gigantic cell with a base rhizoid or root section, a long stem and an umbrella of branches fused into a cap. 

The nucleus sits in the rhizoid section of the cell and if the cap is removed, the cell regenerates a replacement. Furthermore, if the caps of two acetabularia of different species are exchanged, each transplanted cap changes its form to that typical of its new host.

Jezero Malo - the smaller of the two sea lakes

We discovered acetabularia in June, on a visit to Mljet, a beautiful island off the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia (I discovered the charms of Mljet forty-seven years ago in 1970!). 

The western tip of the island has two large turquoise sea lakes, cradled by Karst limestone hills, cloaked in forests of Aleppo pine and linked to the Adriatic by a narrow tidal channel. The warm, sheltered fringes of these lakes provide ideal condition for a morning swim and the growth of these pretty and delicate pioneers of the plant kingdom.

Signs of Spring and Kingfishers at Forest Farm

Forest Farm Reserve near Cardiff is a great place to see and photograph kingfishers and the 'Friends of Forest Farm' who manage the site have placed branches by the two pond hides to encourage the birds to fish close to the hides. For such a small area, there is a surprising variety of habitat, from ponds, streams and a canal to woodland and meadow and all this encourages a heathy diversity of wildlife on the outskirts of Wales's capital city.

Although last Wednesday's visit was disappointing for Kingfishers, there was plenty of interest from other species of wildlife enthusiastically gearing up for spring and the chance of offspring!

It was good to see so many toads in and around the ponds. Frogs and toads have seriously declined in numbers over the past few decades but were definitely thriving at Forest farm, with many males swimming the ponds on the lookout for the much larger females, fat with eggs.

Many birds were busy nest building and using the pond edges as a source of moss to use as a lining material, warm and insulating for the soon to arrive clutch of eggs.


Moorhen too were collecting oversized pieces of reed to build up their untidy raft of a nest among the reed stems. The aim seems to be to build the nest high out of the water to guard against any rise in water levels and possible flooding of the nest.

Because moorhen, like coots, are so common, they are usually treated with disdain by bird watchers but they are attractive, colourful birds and amusing to observe going about their daily lives.

A close up view of a moorhen shows it to be subtly coloured in soft greys and browns with silver trim and set off with scarlet forehead shield and bill tipped with yellow and complementary red eyes.

Moorhen feed on plants gathered from the bottom of the pond or river and dive from the surface to reach their food.

Diving is a slightly ungainly process for moorhen and their oversized, yellow webbed feet seem more of a hindrance than a help but they only have to reach the usually shallow bottom and if they fail, well, they can try again.











Still waiting for the kingfisher, a number of other birds and animals came close to the hide, some too close to photograph. There was a time, in fact, when there was more going on inside the hide than outside. Robins, great and blue tits, a blackbird, a squirrel and even a nuthatch, all after a few crumbs from the sandwich box. The mallard stayed outside though!

Finally, a young magpie landed on the kingfisher's perch and posed for a photograph. Not the halcyon blue beauty I was hoping for but since magpies are surprisingly difficult to catch in any kind of pose, a satisfying shot for me.

Amphibious Affairs

Back at the pond edge there was toad drama as a big female and her chosen paramour were being persistently hassled by a second male trying to get in on the action and oust the current suitor.

 The female was hopping as fast as she could with her amorous partner riding piggy-back and she clearly wasn't interested in a replacement but the second male kept on trying to get aboard.

But every time the intruder tried his luck, the first male kicked violently to throw him off, before they continued their bid for privacy. 

Male frogs and toads, certainly in Europe, always outnumber females, so there is fierce competition to fertilise the eggs. So desperate are the males that large numbers of them will sometimes cling to a female and drown her because she cannot reach the surface to breathe.

And the kingfisher?

Well, the kingfisher did visit the perch twice while I waited but was too skittish to stay for a photograph. There were a couple of male buzzards battling for the skies above the reserve for a couple of hours so they might have spooked some of the birds including my quarry. So no kingfisher images today but here is one of the images from my much more fortunate previous visit a month earlier as a reminder of the beauty of this spectacular bird.

Herons eat fish and frogs. Don't they?

I was photographing a family of warthogs at the busy waterhole of the Voi Wildlife Lodge in Southern Kenya last year when my attention, and my lens, was diverted by this swallow landing on the muddy bank. The bird had clearly been injured in some way, though I did not see how, and was flapping about, trying desperately to take off.

I was not the only one to notice it. One of the many great blue herons fishing in the shallow waters had seen it too and strode menacingly over to investigate.

I assumed that herons hunted for fish and the occasional frog or toad but it was clear that this heron was willing to try a more varied diet.

The bird grabbed the swallow in its sharp beak, dunked the hapless bird briefly in the water and, with only a little trouble because of the bird's size, swallowed it whole!

With a flick of its wings the heron strode off, looking very pleased with itself and carried on fishing.

For life in the African bush, a small slip can see you being rapidly recycled!

Goats of the Avon Gorge

Bristol's Avon Gorge is a nationally important botanical site, containing several rare plant species, some of which are found nowhere else, such as the Bristol onion, Bristol rock cress and several species of whitebeam. When sheep grazing came to an end in the area at the beginning of the 20th century, the open grasslands of the gorge slopes, clearly seen in old prints, became covered in scrub and woodland to the detriment of grassland species.

 So, as part of a project to try to reverse the spread of woodland and encourage a return to open grassland, six white feral goats, all billies, were introduced by Bristol City Council Council and Natural England in 2011.

The goats are now a firmly established feature of 'The Gulley', a steep, fenced cleft in the Bristol side of the gorge, containing some fine south facing slopes with carboniferous limestone cliffs and outcrops. Ideal conditions for a wide variety of herbaceous flora to flourish, given the freedom from encroachment by woody plants. Trees and scrub were cleared from large areas of the four hectare site and it is the goats' job to prevent their regrowth. The goats are quite at home on the steep rocky slopes, have plenty to eat and their physical wellbeing is looked after by the vets at nearby Bristol zoo.

These handsome bearded bachelors forage as a close knit group and clearly get along well. When I photographed them in the early spring of 2015, they were touchingly affectionate during their bouts of playful sparring.

Plough Snails - fastest molluscs on the planet?

This is a favourite image of mine. Taken almost ten years ago on lonely Struisbai beach on the southern coast of South Africa, it's an extreme wideangle shot of a stranded medusa jellyfish being attacked by plough snails, Bullia rhodostoma.

Jos and I seemed to be the only humans on this three mile Indian Ocean beach that day but we shared it with plenty of wildlife. The vast carcass of a long-dead humpback whale attracted scavenging gulls and crows to its rotting blubber, there were lots of other birds around and the beach was littered with jellyfish thrown up by the surf.

Passing a beached blue medusa, we noticed many, what we thought to be hermit crabs, scurrying towards the hapless jellyfish. Looking closer, we were amazed to find that they were marine snails, some three or four centimetres in length.

They moved across the sand at an unbelievable rate for gastropods, 'ploughing' towards the medusa, until eventually, there was quite a crowd of them, scrabbling over each other to get at the jellyfish and piercing its outer membrane with their probosci to feed on the soft tissues.

This short video clip, courtesy of Wikipedia, illustrates beautifully the 'breast stroke' action of the large muscular foot, enabling the snail to move along wet sand at a rate of several metres per minute.

To get anything better than a record shot, I needed to get low down and close to the action, so I used a 10-22mm lens at 10mm (16mm full frame equivalent) and shot from its minimum focus distance. I had to be quick too, because that surf, which looks a long way off due to the wide angle of the lens, was pretty close and throwing waves up the beach beyond the medusa on the receding tide.

Jos's less than flattering shot of me doing this shoot demonstrates the indignity and discomfort we nature photographers must sometimes suffer in pursuit of our craft.

                                                                                                               

Clifton Suspension Bridge's 150th Birthday

  

A Great Night for Bristol

Sunday 7th marked 150 years since the symbol of Bristol, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, first opened to the public. A hundred thousand people were expected to turn up for the firework display at 7.00pm and judging by the enormous crowds at every possible spot within sight of the bridge, that figure may have been reached. The crowds were treated to a stunning twelve minute display of imaginative and colourful pyrotechnics, when palm trees, gigantic feathers, even Niagara Falls appeared over the Avon Gorge. Isembard Kingdom Brunel, who designed the bridge and in whose honour it was completed after his death, would have been proud.