Holiday Photo

Just returned from a week on the Northumberland coast, in a holiday cottage just one minute's walk from the beach at Budle Bay. We've been visiting this coast for over 30 years but I can't remember a week when the weather has been so good - dawn to dusk sunshine, apart from a couple of days when the mist didn't clear until mid-day. 

It's going to take a while to sort out all the pictures of birds, coastal wild flowers and insects, so for now here is a picture of a Budle Bay Sundowner, the ideal aperitif after a long, hot day in the field.

To prepare a Budle Bay Sundowner, take one glass of chilled white wine of your choice and stand it on the kitchen window ledge overlooking the bay, where the sun in all its fiery splendour is sinking slowly towards the horizon. Admire the upside-down image of the bay while you are waiting for the sun to touch the rim of the glass and pour its energy into your drink.

Then drink it.

It does you good: trust me, I'm a doctor 

Because they can .....

Back in 2005 I spent a morning in April photographing fulmars on the cliffs south of Craster on the Northumberland coast. I've long been fascinated by these birds, with their apparently effortless gliding, using the updraft created by cliffs and onshore breezes. They'll spend hours flying around in wide circles, skimming the edge of the cliff and then turning away into a wide arc out to sea, then back to repeat the performance. 

 Why do they fly so much, to no apparent purpose, when they could just perch and survey the scenery? Maybe it's just because they can, because they are as exhilarated by flight as I am by watching them.

Their flight seems almost effortless, with shallow wingbeats followed by long, stiff-winged glides. Sometimes, as they glide past, you can see the turbulence, from air flowing over their wings, lifting and ruffling the smaller wing feathers.

Sometimes they'll fly towards a cliff, lower their legs and touch the rock, they turn and glide away again ....

... or sometimes hang in the air, almost stationary for a moment, tail feathers splayed and cocked up, legs lowered, on the verge of stalling, before turning and racing away to skim the sea surface.

Those long, narrow, high aspect ratio wings are the prototype for every glider .

I've almost convinced myself that fulmars enjoy showing off. Often, if you stand on the top of a cliff, they'll circle around and repeatedly glide past you, just a few metres away, and will turn their heads to look at you as they pass. Maybe they're as curious about me as I am about them.

For all their solitary flying, during the early part of the breeding season fulmars  indulge in a lot of vocal interaction which sounds like chuckling, when they're choosing nest sites and pair-bonding.

This kind of interaction, facing one another with gaping beaks and seemingly trying to shout each other down, is common behaviour in spring.

You can see clearly here the peculiar beak with the tubular nostril which gives the fulmar family the name 'tubenoses', and also the claw-like tip to the beak which you can also see in this photograph of a skull. 

At this time of year there is, inevitably, a feeling of regret that summer has passed but also a remembrance of all the natural events that will begin again next spring - when fulmars return to their cliff edge nest sites.

Red, Yellow and Blue

There a few spectacles in the British countryside that rival a field of poppies in full bloom. There are two fields at Warkworth on the Northumberland coast that are currently ablazed with these scarlet flowers. Like many plants, poppies produce seeds that can remain dormant in the soil for decades. They require light for germination, so only burst into life after they’ve been brought to the surface by the passing of a plough. Poppies belong to a group of arable weeds that includes corn chamomile, corn cockle, corn flower, corn marigold, bugloss and henbit whose flowering depends on regular soil disturbance, so they have always been a feature of agricultural landscapes since farming first began. In Victorian times all these species were very common, but the development of efficient seed cleaning technologies for cereal crop seed production and the advent of effective modern herbicides have removed them from fields so efficiently that many are now rare. Poppy’s vast seed output has been its salvation. Poppies survive seed burial for long periods and are often revived temporarily when new roads are cut through former agricultural land, or when grassland that was long ago planted with wheat and barley is freshly ploughed.

Behind the dunes at Warkworth, about half way to Alnmouth, there's currently another wonderful floral display in a patch of swampy ground. A single yellow flag iris (above) is a thing of beauty, but half an acre of them in full bloom is something else.......

And a little closer to Warkworth, in a corner of a field that has been left unplanted, there's the most stunning display of bugloss, a cornfield annual that occurs sporadically in the North east but here grows in such abundance that about a quarter of an acre is tinted with forget-me-knot blue.

We lament the fact that some individual wild flower species are becoming rare, but it's even more regrettable that massed floral spectacles like this, once common, are now few and far between...

Life Skills

All along the Northumbrian coast there are eider ducklings learning the rudiments of survival. From the moment they hatch they are completely at home in the sea, bobbing in the surf as buoyant as corks and using those over-sized feet to dive below the waves and explore the seabed.

At this stage they're too small to hunt larger shore crabs that are adults' favourite food items, so explore every nook and cranny for something edible that.....

..... might be dislodged by the incoming tide, all under the watchful gaze ....

... of an anxious adult. Once chuckling alarm call from her and they all head for the comparative safety of the sea....

Photographed at Craster on the Northumberland coast, at the weekend.