Season's Greetings

… and a Very Merry Christmas to Everyone

Yes it's my photo of a Yorkshire Robin, I just added a bit more snow.

Red Kite, Picture of the Week 5 March 2014

Red kite photographed on 3 March 2014, soaring above a multi-storey car-park in High Wycombe, Berkshire.

Three hundred or more years ago red kites lived throughout Britain and Ireland and were a common sight even in cities. Shakespeare wrote of them as stealing underwear from clothes lines! Kites have diverse appetites, eating small birds, rodents, frogs, insects, earthworms and carrion. Where they scavenged on man made rubbish and carrion they were often welcomed as useful in cleaning the streets.

 

But one hundred years ago the picture was very different. Only a handful of red kites were left, in the West of Wales. Elsewhere they had been shot and poisoned out of existence, mainly by landowners, farmers and gamekeepers. Other birds of prey were treated with the same arrogant brutality, but most survived in larger numbers than the unfortunate kites. 

 

Today the kites are back. Once they were protected, the Welsh population began to expand. In England, Scotland and Northern Ireland they have been re-introduced in groups, sometimes using birds originating in Scandinavia. In England the reintroduced birds can be found in the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire area, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Gateshead, Northumberland and the Newcastle area and Grizedale Forest in Cumbria. The Scottish population is centred around the release sites in Dumfries and Galloway, Stirling-shire and west Perthshire, around Black Isle in Ross-shire, and on the outskirts of Aberdeen City.

 

All the re-introduced groups have formed breeding populations and the total number in the UK today is around 1,600 pairs, according to the RSPB, who keep a close eye on them. Still not a lot of birds, but where they live, they are quite visible and not afraid to fly over towns and cities. The first kite for 150 years was seen in London in 2006 - http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shakespeares-red-kite-returns-to-london-after-an-absence-of-150-years-522771.html



The Best Building in London - The Natural History Museum

This wonderful Romanesque entrance doesn't lead into a cathedral but to my favourite London building, the Natural History Museum, on Cromwell Road. The temporary barriers don't enhance the appearance, but are sometimes necessary for crowd control in a building which has almost five million visitors each year.

I was first taken to the Natural History Museum when I was just five or six and I fell in love with the building before we even got inside. The exterior of the building is covered with statues, gargoyles and plaques of creatures which were hand-modelled and then cast in terracotta. I was fascinated by the plaques around the gates which depict mice and squirrels.



Plaque depicting three mice on a gatepost
 outside the main entrance.

No creature is too insignificant, everything from mice and beetles to wolves and sabre-toothed tigers are sculpted.

Pterodactyl plaque on the roof

Large statue of a Sabre-toothed cat
on the West tower, stylised to appear
heraldic - the head was cast separately

Small plaque of a crab on a mullion between
lower ground floor windows








The designs were individually sketched by Alfred Waterhouse, the Liverpool architect who was responsible for the whole building. His sketches were then sculpted and cast by a firm of terracotta manufacturers Farmer & Brindley. The named sculptor is M. Dujardin,
his first name was possibly Oscar or Hubert. He is thought to have been French but little is now known about him.

The building's two wings depicted different groups of creatures, those ornamenting the exterior of the West wing were extinct, those on the East wing were, at the time they were modelled, still surviving. Some larger sculptures had to be cast in more than one piece and certain creatures were given heraldic stylisation.

Today the building is in a much better state than when I first saw it. The exterior was cleaned of a century's worth of London soot and grime in the 1970's, I remember it as being  all black. Now the detailed terracotta can be enjoyed in all its glory.

Big Garden Birdwatch - Long Tailed Tits, Picture of the Week 2 February 2012

Every year the RSPB conduct a huge survey of garden birds. This is done by taking a snapshot of the birds people all over the UK see in their gardens during the last weekend of January. The first survey took place in 1979, the most recent was last weekend. This year the first birds I spotted were three redpolls, which wasn’t surprising as they’ve been regular visitors since I hung a nyger seed feeder on the clothesline. They were followed by blackbirds, magpie, great tits, a nuthatch, chaffinch and blue-tits and my favourites, the long-tailed tits, who gathered on the fat balls. But there were fewer species this year, no sparrows, starlings, siskins, goldfinch or great spotted woodpecker.

Grimescar Valley, midwinter: Picture of the Week 26 Jan. 2013

Grimescar Valley, Tuesday 22 Jan 2013

 



This is why I've spent most of this week at home. Very picturesque but roads are treacherous and the wildlife doesn't enjoy it much either. I have put out five different bird-feeders.

Around here, grey squirrels have brown patches. They are very acrobatic, the only bird feeders they can't extract food from are those like the one on the left in this photo, where the cage of peanuts or birdseed in enclosed inside another cage. Sadly this also puts off some birds.

 

This squirrel is feasting on fat balls, which most of the birds love too. There is usually a backbird or pigeon on the ground below the feder, picking up all the scraps which the squirrel drops. The smaller birds avoid the squirrels.

 

The robin can't perch on the hanging feeders, neither can the blackbirds, so I've attached a fat block to an antique wooden post, made of well weathered oak, which has supported my washing lines for thirty years and before that who knows how many other peoples laundry for n-years. Tumble dryers are for those with no sense of history!

Duck! In all directions. Picture of the Week 7 December 2012

Can you spot any two which are looking in the same direction?
And where's Wally?

Yorkshire Landscape, with Lions; Picture of the Week, the ones I missed...

I began posting pictures of the week on 6 October 2011, with the intention of posting one every week for one year. I've just done a count and I think I only missed three weeks in the year. As health problems have meant I haven't taken as many new photographs since January as I would have liked, I don't feel too displeased with this.

I've enjoyed looking through old photos too, and I will continue posting a picture weekly.

In the mean time, here's one for a week which I missed...



Yorkshire Wildlife Park, 28 August 2012

London Zoo's Listed Building Problem

Zoos Ain’t What they Used to Be.
Modern zoos are not what they were even as recently as the 1960’s and this is a probably a good thing. I remember as a child being taken to see polar bears living in what looked like a concrete pit, where they had to endure baking sun with only a small, grey pool for their comfort, which seemed a poor substitute for the Arctic Ocean.



Mappin Teraces, 1972 photo by Sue Gilbert

This was at London Zoo, on the famous Mappin Terraces, which may have been architecturally innovative and apparently practical, providing a catchment for water to feed the aquarium below, but it was no place for a polar bear.

Constructed in 1913 in the newest fashionable materiel, reinforced concrete, the Mappin Terraces were jointly designed by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, secretary of the Zoological Society and Scottish architect John James Joass. The terraces were intended to simulate mountain scenery which it was thought would be a good backdrop for the display of bears and other creatures who could climb the rocks.  This illustrates the historic attitude; while London Zoo was established in the 1830’s as a collection for scientific study, the animals were on display to paying visitors by 1847 and though relatively well treated, their environmental requirements were not understood. Their primary function was to be an exhibit.

Today we know better, at least with some species, and there are no polar or any other bears at London Zoo, while its sister zoo at Whipsnade houses European brown bears in a large woodland enclosure. The now Grade II listed Mappin Terraces house Australian wildlife, emu, wallaby and others more suited to the arid, rocky environment. The only polar bears in the UK today live at the Highland Wildlife Park in the Cairngorms, where they roam in enclosures of several acres, with a lake and the climate is much more suitable for such Arctic species.

Sowerby Bridge Geese, Picture of the Week for 15 September 2012

One way and another, the West Yorkshire town of Sowerby Bridge is well endowed with geese.  There's Goose Nest Lane which runs from Long Lane to Hob Lane and the Hobbit Hotel.  And then there are the actual geese.  The Ryburn, a small river which feeds into the River Calder in the town, provides an inviting environment for a flock of twenty-five or thirty white geese, who remain all year round.  They share the stream with duck and other wildlife right in the centre of the town.

If they stayed in the Ryburn, the geese might be universally popular, but they regard the town as their territory and wander en-masse all over the place.  They intimidate small dogs and children.  They stop traffic.  They pooh outside the pubs, shit by the sports centre and defecate by... well you get the picture.  Whilst they aren't a totally wild species they aren't domesticated either, belonging to nobody, so some town councellors and residents want to get rid of them. 

View from St. Andrews Church Spire, Worcester. Picture of the week for 27 April 2012

This picture of the week was taken in 1990. It shows the excavations which preceeded construction of the Crowngate centre in the historic centre of Worcester. The semi-circular building to the left is the front of the Huntingdon Hall, formerly a choral chapel and a historic building which was on the boundary of the building site and had to be completely undisturbed, causing many headaches for the architect and developer. Despite many local objections the hall uses Crowngate as its address, and is now a thriving arts centre accessed via the Centre.

Chapel Walk site, shot from St Andrew's Church tower, October1990

One fascinating thing is that today you can see almost the same view, as it looks right now and updated every few seconds on a webcam. This is camera 5 of the Peregrine Falcon watch which is located on the spire of St Andrews Church, from where the picture of the week was also taken. Earlier this month, on 20th April this spire was struck by lightening and all the cameras failed. Some are now up and running again and the views of the town and birds are at http://www.worcester.gov.uk/peregrine/

Wallaby Wannabe: Picture of the Week 23 March 2012

The spring is sprung, the grass is riz,
I wonder where the wallabies iz...?

I don't claim to be a great wildlife photographer, but these companions at Yorkshire Wildlife park, Doncaster don't seem very wild...
Neither wallabies nor rabbits are native species to Doncaster, although rabbits have been there longer, having been introduced to England during Roman times. Before that rabbits were Southern European species and wallabies were confined to Australasia until the eighteenth century.

The European rabbit is the same species and also occurs in north Africa, although all rabbits are decendants of stone age Spanish rabbits. The Latin name Oryctolagus cuniculus refers to all of them including domestic rabbits, whatever their colour, size and shape. The earliest remains of rabbits in the UK were found in Norfolk in 2004. They appeared to have been butchered and eaten by Roman soldiers around 45 AD. In Medieval times they were called conies, the word rabbit originally meant the young of the coney and the word bunny was once a Scottish word for a squirel. The domestic 'Belgian hare' is actually a giant rabbit...

Hares are different species, brown hares were also introduced to the UK by the Romans, mountain hares are the same species as Arctic hares and have lived in the UK since the ice age 10,000 plus years ago.

There are several species of wallabies native to Australia and New Guinea. Wallabies are marsupials like their larger relations the kangaroos. Unlike rabbits and hares they were not brought to England as food but as exotic species for zoos in Victorian times. They now live wild in a few UK locations including the Chilterns and Inchconnachan, an Island on Loch Lomond. There is also a large population on the Isle of Man.

Hound Tor, Picture of the Week for Friday 9 December 2011

Even though I'm an architectural photographer, every now and then I do take photographs which contain absolutely nothing fabricated by man. Some pedants may complain that of course this landscape has been altered by the human race, but I very deliberately chose to use the word fabricated.

This view of Dartmoor shows Hound Tor on the horizon, beneath a glowing sky, viewed from the much less famous (and much lower) tor at Lower Elsford, near Bovey Tracey.