A few highlights on our walk in South Tynedale, from the footpath beside the narrow gauge railway, including a song thrush giving it full volume, a willow warbler, water avens just coming into flower, a hunting stoat and a wasp chewing wood fibres from the footpath signpost, for nest building.
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The Water Avens is absolutely stunning.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dean. I've found that if I photograph flowers against the sky, using the soft flash setting on my Pentax W20 pocket camera, it produces spot-on exposures most of the time. Wish I could claim credit but it's all down to the camera and trial-and-error.
ReplyDeleteAgree, that Water Avens is superb from that angle.
ReplyDeleteYou certainly sussed it out for the Water Avens photo. I would have ended up with a silhouette in that situation.
ReplyDeleteOn quiet Summers days I often hear the wasps tearing my fences apart. Lovely detailed shot even if it does look too close for comfort for me.
Thanks Keith and John, water avens (plus lady's smock) is one the the features of the flora alongside the railway drainage ditches in spring, but its diffcult to really appreciate the beauty of the nodding avens flowers unless you take a look at them from underneath.
ReplyDeleteYour wasp photo struck me. So often crushed under a rolled up paper yet I had just watched one build the most elegant of structures. From an inverted half dome on the shed ceiling to a perfect little sphere hanging on a thread in under an hour. It reminded me of a defiant nest I found some years ago that had almost completely enveloped an old Murphy's insecticide tin.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment Nyctalus. One of the thing that fascinates me about wasps is the way in which the individuals work as a team to produce that wonderful nest structure, with different individuals contributing their own distinctly coloured strips of chewed up wood to the overall structure. It's a phenomenal piece of instinctive behaviour, because in their short lives they have no chance to learn by trial-and-error.
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