My Flora and Fauna Friday post this week is a follow-up of sorts to last week’s post, Bluebells.
This is a male Orange Tip Butterfly (Anthocharis cardamines) feeding on Bluebells in a cottage garden at Faddiley near Nantwich in southern Cheshire, England.
Found throughout Europe and temperate Asia, in the U.K. it is another sign of spring. The female does not have the orange tip on the forewing.
This is my contribution to Debbie’s One Word Sunday prompt Spring.
After a few days of spring like weather winter returned last Friday.
However, that hasn’t stopped the summer birds appearing. We had at least half a dozen Dark-eyed Juncos around the yard on Friday.
This is my contribution to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Birds prompt.
With nearly 40 years of bird photography in my archives I decided to go with one photo from each decade.
1980s. An adult Eurasian Blue Tit feeding young in a specially constructed nestbox in a garden in Hatherton near Nantwich in southern Cheshire, England.
1990s. Male and female American Avocets in summer (breeding) plumage on a slough near Punnichy, Saskatchewan, Canada.
2000s. An Osprey with a White Sucker on the Lake Huron shoreline in Southampton, Ontario, Canada.
2010s. An immature Ruby-throated Hummingbird on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario, Canada.
This week Tina gives us the prompt Special Moments for the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.
A female Wilson’s Phalarope. I was on a section of the Middle Quill Lake shoreline looking for summer migrants when half a dozen Wilson’s Phalaropes flew in and started feeding around me. I lay down in the sand (and wildfowl poop) to photograph them at eye level. They completely ignored me, some of the birds came so close I couldn’t focus on them.
Having been experimenting with intentional camera movement recently this photo may be where it started for me. A competitor in the 1982 Le Mans 24 hour motorcycle endurance race enters the start/finish straight shortly before midnight. Far to abstract for the magazine editor but I liked the images and have been experimenting on and off ever since.
An adult Eurasian Blue Tit feeding young in a specially constructed nestbox in a garden in Hatherton near Nantwich, Cheshire. I documented the entire nesting cycle from the beginning of nest building to the empty nestbox after the last youngster had left. Extensively published I spent a week looking at a nestbox photo on the contents page of the Radio Times without recognising it as mine.
Storm clouds and light beams over Loch Arkaig, Scotland. I was in Scotland one autumn with the plan of doing lots of landscape photography. With almost constant rain I wasn’t getting a lot of photos until the end of day three when the rain stopped towards sunset. One of the photos from this evening was published worldwide by Olympus Japan and won a national photo contest on the theme of ‘The Beauty of Light.’
This is my contribution to the Weekly Prompts Wednesday Challenge: Waiting.
This is my contribution to the Tuesday Photo Challenge – Twist prompt.
I had a few ideas for the prompt and even edited photos of two species of snakes before heading off in a different direction.
An adult Eurasian Blue Tit twists to feed the young while the young twist to try to get the food. The young are almost fully grown at this stage meaning that the adults often cling to the entrance hole to feed them.
