Tag: nature

Shiny Shoes!

Conker Shoes

Yay, my shiny new Conker shoes have arrived!

They were delivered on Friday, while I was out at work. Paul very kindly went to pick them up from the sorting office for me while I was out at work on Saturday. He was somewhat startled to find that the postman knew me, and was not at all surprised to discover that the parcel contained shoes! He used to drive the delivery van for our area, so he got to know me very well in the days when I was collecting unusual Dr Martens from Ebay. Sometimes he used to wait on the doorstep while I opened my parcels, so he could see my unusual choice of shoes. I think he’d have been impressed by these!

I wore the shoes to work on Sunday, and they’re lovely! Not quite enough room for orthotics and handknit socks both at once, which tells me I should probably have ordered a 6F rather than a 6E. Conker offer amazing customer service and I could have sent them back to be stretched a little bit, but being the impatient sort I couldn’t resist wearing them straight away.

Conker Shoes

The lovely people at Conker are probably going to cry when they see this picture. I don’t think they’d take them back in this state! Yes, I knew it had been raining, and I should have put on a big pair of boots. But, new shoes!
(I know, I know. And yes, I have cleaned them now that the mud’s dry.)


Photo © Sarah Wainwright

I went for a walk with Sarah (Skycarrots), and we sketched and made rubbings and nibbled leaves and took pictures. Sarah took a picture of me, taking a picture of my shoes. She also took some lovely ones of a meadow full of cowslips, glowing as the light faded. We’re planning on making these walks a regular occurrence, so hopefully we’ll have full sketchbooks and photo albums to show you soon. It was lovely to go out with a friend, and find a bit of creative inspiration in our local area.

Grant Museum of Zoology

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL

Somebody at the Grant Museum of Zoology definitely has a sense of humour. These four skeletons are perfectly placed to watch over the whole museum from their vantage point in the first floor gallery!

Those of a sensitive disposition should probably look away now, because the Grant Museum is filled with skeletons and things in jars. And when I say “filled”, I really mean it. I was reminded a little of the displays at Pitt Rivers, where the museum is as much about the origins of the collection itself as the individual objects in it.

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL

There’s a whole cabinet full of brains from different animals, so that you can compare and contrast them. I just love the way the parts have been labelled with little slips of paper stuck directly into the specimen. This one is

Brain of “Dog” in median section to show the main convolutions and sulci.

(Sulci: pl. depression or fissure in the surface of the brain. The bumpy bits are gyri.)

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL

I didn’t make a note of exactly which species this is, but it reminded me of Skycarrots‘ beautifully delicate photograms of Mermaids’ Purses that she found on the beach. When you find these washed up they’ve usually already hatched, so I find it really exciting to be able to see one from the inside.

The museum’s currently open Monday-Friday, 1-5pm. I didn’t stay long because I was on a trip to UCL with work, so I’m going again on Monday. This time with a better camera, and a friend who wants to see the baby manatee!

(Yes, this does mean there’ll be more pictures. Sorry, Lettice!)

Walk in the woods

Web

I had to go out to the Post Office this morning, and it started off as a very misty day. I thought I might be able to take some photos of trees dramatically silhouetted against the sky, so I took the camera with me. As it turned out I’d brought along the macro lens, which isn’t so good for dramatic trees, so I took lots of photos of little details of things instead.

Oak leaves

This was supposed to be a picture of a beautiful green shoot springing forth vigorously from the ground… but the plant was out of focus, so I cropped it out. Can you tell I have a lot to learn about the macro lens? Look at the lovely texture of these leaves though!

Blossom

Still very misty, and quite dark as I walked into the woods. If you look closely (or click the picture to see a larger version on Flickr), you can see tiny dewdrops all over the petals.

Acorn

Buried treasure! This acorn had been recently unearthed, but apparently deemed not good enough for eating.

Hole

I do like a good hole to peep through. This one made me want to go back to the doll that I never finished making. In my imagination, she looks great perched in this tree.

Buds

Look! It’s spring! Finally.

Catkins

I must admit, I had real trouble getting the macro lens to focus where I wanted it to. Left on automatic, it was zooming in and out all over the place. This one was done using manual focus, but I’m so used to using the big screen on the back of my point and shoot camera that I find the viewfinder too tiny to see through properly. (That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.)

Crocus with dewdrop

Sometimes things worked out pretty nicely though – I didn’t even see the tiny dewdrop on the end of the crocus leaf until I looked at this image on the computer.

Bud

By the time I was heading back home it was a beautifully sunny morning. I must get out with the camera more often. It was so satisfying to take a very slow walk and really look at everything around me.

Walk in the woods

Unfortunately I underestimated how much mud I might bring back with me, otherwise I’d have worn my walking boots!

Feathers and Fur

Feathers & Fur
Peregrine

I haven’t taken any bird photos for a while… but today was Paul’s birthday trip, which was a visit to Feathers and Fur, a local falconry centre. It’s a tiny place, inside a garden centre, and a friend had told us about a Groupon offer on their Hands On falconry sessions.

Feathers & Fur
Willow, barn owl

We were incredibly lucky to have the entire two hour session to ourselves, and even though it’s apparently not the right time of year for falconry (the birds should be out hunting and getting fat), everyone behaved beautifully.

Sadie was really friendly and taught us lots of things about the birds, their environment, and how she raises and looks after them. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and we laughed for most of the session. It turns out that watching a barn own swallow his lunch whole is somewhat inelegant, but absolutely hilarious!

Feathers & Fur
Kestrel

I used the 70mm macro lens this time, and I’m really pleased with the photos I managed to take. I went for portraits rather than action pictures (Paul has some gorgeous ones of the owls in flight), and am thrilled with the detail on the image below. The snow made the light a bit weird and I was worried about the photos being over-exposed, so I dropped the ISO down to 400. I think that was a mistake, as some of the images are darker than I’d like, but I definitely had a higher success rate than I have in the past!

Feathers & Fur
Billie Jean, eagle owl

You can see the rest of my photos over on Flickr. If you’re feeling sensitive, one of them’s a bit gruesome (the aforementioned barn owl lunch), but hey, everybody needs to eat.

We’ll definitely be going back and booking another session – probably a dedicated photography one next time. Sadie took some great shots with Paul’s camera, and understands how to position you to get the pictures you want. Although it’s always nice to have the opportunity to have the birds fly to you, so another session like the one we had today would be great.

(Note to self: No, you can’t have a barn owl. Really.)

Impolite Beetle

Stag Beetle

Walking home yesterday evening, this female stag beetle crossed my path. When I stopped to take a photo, she stuck her tongue out at me. How rude!

Tuppence a Bag

Feeding the Lorikeets

Way back in February, on our way home from Devon, we stopped off at Bristol Zoo.

I took a few photos, as usual, but I wasn’t feeling very well that day so I wanted to try and concentrate on seeing as much as possible and having a good time. I love anywhere that you can actually walk in amongst the animals, so getting to feed the lorikeets was the highlight of my day. You pay £1 for a little cup of nectar, stand in the designated feeding area, and noisy little parrots come and land all over you. Brilliant!

There was also a lemur enclosure that you could walk through, where we met ringtailed and mongoose lemurs and a bird forest. (More about that later.) There were also the most adorable fruitbats, but being February they’d wisely decided to stay indoors!

I loved the Twighlight area, which featured several aye-ayes, a not-very-slow loris, and the tiniest deer I’d ever seen. So cute! I also spent a long time failing to get a decent photo of a hilariously grumpy-looking chameleon, and laughing at a tern with a very dignified moustache.

I wouldn’t normally recommend going to the zoo on a freezing cold day in February, much less the first weekend of half term, but we really enjoyed ourselves.

Canada Goose Drama

Me, by Paul
(Picture by Paul, taken in May 2008)

This weekend my parents came to visit. On Friday afternoon we all went down to the lake where we took part in a Canada Goose Drama.

A swan came and attacked all six of the goslings, splitting them up from their parents and chasing them away. As soon as the swan started bearing down on them, the goslings would dive underneath the water and then surface quite a distance away. One of the goslings leapt out of the lake, ran up the bank and ended up dashing down the steps onto the duck-watching platform which was full of my parents, me and Paul, plus two small boys and their Mum.

The gosling became entangled in abandoned fishing line (the fishing season only started last week and already there’s fishing line strewn everywhere), so I went over and untangled it. The poor gosling was so freaked out that it just stood there, and thankfully did not peck me to death. I then herded it back into the lake.

In the meantime one of the parents had come out of the lake to look for it. This adult goose arrived on the platform only to discover seven humans and NO GOSLING, and proceeded to hiss like mad and charge at us. The two little boys were understandably terrified, so my Dad and I attempted to herd the adult goose back into the lake as well. Unfortunately the adult goose was so cross that it wasn’t afraid of us, so we had to get rather close to it. This resulted in my Dad being heartily pecked on the knee. He was fine, but the two little boys are now rather frightened of angry geese.

We ended up staying at the lake for quite a while longer, counting the goslings and making sure they’d all made it back to their family despite the best efforts of the swan. Thankfully they were all fine, and hopefully the swan won’t continue to bother them too much.

Leaves in the snow.

I went for a walk in the snow this morning. I took a grand total of 99 pictures, then came back and edited them down to just 9. I went out rather early, so although there was a lot of light reflecting from the snow, it wasn’t really daylight yet. As a result a lot of the pictures were rather grainy. I also took a lens that I’m not really used to using (70mm macro), so it took me a while to get the hang of it.

I ended up concentrating mainly on single leaves. Some were still just about clinging on to the trees, others were lying in the snow. I’m honestly not sure what’s going on with this one! It’s clearly not attached to a tree, so it must be lying on the ground, but somehow it looks as though it’s floating.

I particularly like looking at the largest version of this one. It’s still rather grainy, but you can see an absolutely amazing amount of detail of the structure of the leaf.

Square Format

Frog

This is the big fat frog that hopped out from underneath the broken fence as we were pulling it down. He didn’t seem too keen to get out of our way – Paul had to rather unceremoniously pick him up and plop him down in next door’s plant pot!

This morning, whilst wandering around on Flickr, I joined a group for square format photographs. I tend to crop my nature photos into squares, so it seemed like an interesting place to look around and see what other people were doing.

In one of the discussion threads there was a conversation about square format digital cameras. That’s where I found out about the Rollieflex MiniDigi. It’s styled exactly like the original Rollei twin lens reflex camera, but it’s teeny-tiny! (Smaller than this frog, in fact.) Unfortunately it costs over £350, and the resolution’s only 3 megapixels, but it does look as though it would be fun to use. Also, cute!

(Not that “cute” is my primary criterion for choosing things. Of course not. “Does it come in pink?” is much more important. Obviously.)

Encounter With Owls…

Eagle Owl

I’m just dropping in for a flying visit to upload the photos from the first part of our honeymoon – you can see them all here.

Yesterday we had a Falconry session in the morning, and an Encounter With Owls in the afternoon. This enormous chap was featured in both. His name’s Woolly, and he’s an Eagle Owl.

We also met a Merlin called Angel, a Gyr/Peregrine Falcon called Romeo, a Harris Hawk called Miller, and lots and lots of owls.

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of birds in general, and birds of prey in particular, so getting to spend a couple of hours getting to feed them and fly them to the glove was absolutely amazing.

You can tell how much I enjoyed it by my enormous grin – that’s Woolly on my arm. I’m leaning slightly away from him because I’d already learnt the hard way that his wings were long enough to hit me in the face!

I don’t know of anywhere local that rescues or rehabilitates birds, but I might have to do a bit of research when I get home. It would be brilliant to be able to have contact with birds like this more often.