Peregrine

You would think that your first sighting of a peregrine would be the one that sticks in your mind.  But, in truth, I have only a vague recollection of a fast-moving dot disturbing waders on mudflats, probably on the Dee Estuary, but maybe somewhere else.  Too far away to provide any detail - especially with the cheap binoculars I had at the time - the dot was behaving the way a peregrine was supposed to, so that's what it must have been.  That was thirty years ago.

Some years later I became part of the team watching peregrine nest sites and keeping an eye out for egg collectors.  My sightings of peregrines improved as I learned where to look, how to spot a potential nest site, and to wait to see if it was occupied.  And if the birds had fed shortly before I got there, it could be a very long wait.

My most vivid memory of that time was of a female peregrine who had been incubating her eggs on a cold (in shadow) rocky ledge.  Her mate had decided it was time he took over and called her off the nest.  She shuffled across the ledge, looking old and stiff, to the edge.  The male came to perch just above the nest, the female stretched and launched herself into the air.  Suddenly she was a different creature. 

Released from the shackles of nest duty, she had the freedom of the skies! She swooped up and down, making big circles but never going out of sight of the nest.  She played with the feral pigeons nearby - threatening them but never looking like a serious hunter.  She went higher and stooped down again, and again, seeming almost to loop-the-loop at times. It was exhilarating to see, and I felt she enjoyed doing it as much as I enjoyed watching.  Then, it was time to go back to the nest.  She called, her mate moved away to his regular perch, and she shuffled back into position to keep the eggs warm.

On another occasion I was walking the coast path, again looking for peregrines and chough.  A peregrine called from somewhere down the cliffs, but out of sight.  A few minutes later another peregrine came screaming across the fields.  He slowed as he came closer, still screaming.  I felt he was saying "come and look at what I've got here!".  There was an answer from the down the cliffs - "I'm coming", and each call was getting closer.  I turned round in time to see the female rise on the updraught, with a look of absolute astonishment as she came level with me.  Wow! - she was only a few feet away.  She rose higher, and joined her mate in circling higher and higher overhead.

Twice I have seen a peregrine in my garden.  Once in Oxfordshire where the bird landed on the fence, but flew off as I reached for my binoculars.  And once here in Pembrokeshire where there was one with a pigeon on the lawn.  My sudden appearance at the study window must have startled the bird, for it flew off, complaining loudly and leaving the pigeon behind.  I think it would have returned, except that builders arrived at the house next door to repair the roof.  The peregrine hung around, often perched on a tree across the field, and often calling, but not able to find the courage to come so close to humans to collect its lunch.

Walking back from the British Steel hide at the Penclacwydd Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Reserve, I became aware of a commotion and turned in time to see a peregrine stooping on a moorhen which was half running half flying to the safety of the water.  It somersaulted a few times when the peregrine hit it, but the bird came around again and pinned it to the ground.  It late on a grey wintry afternoon.  I dropped to my haunches, slowly slid the camera out of its bag, set it on the tripod and took a few pictures before the peregrine took its meal to some more private place.  My only camouflage was the pack of ducks and geese crowding around to see if I had any food for them.

My most recent, even closer, encounter happened about 18 months ago when I was sitting on a cliff-top on Ramsey, watching through a telescope.  As I reached for my notebook to record a passing razorbill, I noticed a lump on the edge of the cliff that hadn't been there before.  I knew immediately, without looking properly, that it was a peregrine.  I slowly removed the camera and long lens from on top of its bag and aimed it at the bird - no more than thirty feet away.  She wasn't bothered, though I daren't risk swapping the telescope for the camera - that would have meant a lot of movement.  I did take three photos, handheld, before the bird took a second look at something - lunch perhaps - below the cliff, and casually dropped off in that direction. 

I still get a thrill out of watching peregrines, but when it comes to wild peregrines the emphasis really is on watching.  Only once have I gone out with the intention of photographing one.  That was on Ramsey, near a nest site, where the birds were used to people watching from the top of the cliff, and there were good opportunities for pictures birds in flight.

How, then, do I have hundreds of pictures of peregrines?  I have no hesitation in taking advantage of falconer's birds.  Birds that are put into positions where they would have been found in the wild.  Here I can take photographs, relaxed in the knowledge that the bird is not going to fly away.  The bird is relaxed because it is used to being around humans.  Is it cheating?  Only if I claim the picture to be taken in the wild when it isn't.  Is it ethical?  I am not disturbing the bird, I am not near a nest, no licence is required (except by the falconer). 

And I can still go out and enjoy watching wild peregrines, but without fretting about how I am ever going to close enough to take a decent photograph!

Light at the end of the tunnel . . . . ?

Once upon a time I was working all hours of daylight and more, milking cows and doing all the associated chores.  The great advantage was that it entailed working with animals, and living in the countryside.  But there wasn't much time to enjoy the countryside, or anything else much for that matter.  So after 15 years, I quit and tried to make a different life.

At first I had time, but no money.  Work started to come in, I was able to upgrade my photography equipment, then get into video, travel a bit, etc.  After another fifteen years, I was still living in the countryside, doing all sorts of interesting things with wildlife, and enjoying it.

But the good things don't always last.  For the past six years especially, the work load has got heavier and heavier.  I have the camera and video equipment but very little time to use it.  I try to cut down my work hours, but usually by the end of the week I'm falling behind as people want more and more, and then I'm back to that old work-eat-sleep routine.  The difference this time is that I'm getting unfit, fat and decidedly unhealthy.  I still live in the countryside but I'm not out in it the way I used to be. I can afford to travel a bit more, but don't have the time.

From time to time I get a flash image of myself.  One was of being attached to the world by a string, holding on for dear life as I was pulled along, going with the flow but not a part of it.  Another was of myself as a banana, with sections of skin being peeled away as I lost touch with things I wanted to be doing.  The most recent one was in a glass box barely big enough for me to crouch inside. I was being bombarded with information, but struggling to take in what I needed for work and desperately trying to keep the rest out because I hadn't time to deal with it.

There are times when I wonder if it is all worth it.  Why do people keep telling me it is good to be busy?  It isn't good, or even healthy, to be so busy that you don't have a life. The odd hour or so here and there just isn't enough.

We are coming to the end of another year - the Solstice is in a week's time.  Can I get the work things finished and up-to-date by then?  Can I start something new that is for me?

I need to find that life that I had ten years ago, and improve on it.  Every time I see light at the end of the (work) tunnel, someone switches it off again.  Somehow I have to keep that light switched on.

I want to be a field naturalist again, not a computer one!

With hindsight . . .

I'm continuing to go through those 20,000 photos in between bouts of data analysis - and I'm not sure which is the worst!

This evening I've been looking at pictures from Madeira in 2006.  It was the second real outing for my new digital camera kit and I was excited at having added a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle zoom to my kit. 

This was my first real wide angle lens - previously I'd had only the 28mm end of a standard zoom on my old film cameras.  I didn't really know how to use it, and was armed only with a few tips remembered from various magazine articles.  And that probably explains the unimaginative and generally poor results. 

Most of the photographs were flowers taken with the macro lens mounted on a tripod.  No macro flash or other help.  And there were just a few photos with the long lens - Bertholot's pipit and a few seabirds.  Madeira is not a good place to photograph birds - there aren't that many of species, and most of the really interesting ones are in the forest canopy and hard to see.

But back to those photos.  I thought I had already been through them and weeded out the worst of them.  And looking at the file numbers, the original 1500 or so had been reduced to just over 1000.  So why am I finding so many plant pictures in particular that are pooly exposed and definitely not sharp?  Wind and misty weather might account for some, but why hadn't I thrown them out before now?

Part of it was being afraid of throwing out pictures before I'd identified the plants - Madeira has so many plants from so many places, often growing outside of gardens, that identifying them, when there isn't a comprehensive field guide - is something of a problem.  A problem I haven't had time to deal with.  So the pictures have been sitting there, taking up space on the hard drive, when really I should have thrown them out and left myself with only the decent ones to deal with.

Well, better late than never, as they say, and so the delete button is getting a lot of use!

I must write something . . . .

If this Neglected Rustic moth hadn't been identified when it was caught, there woud be no chance of identifying it from the picture alone. 

This morning I labelled most of the photos (mostly moths) that hadn't been labelled yet.   Not that labelling is the right word any more - the days of printing out labels (and the fuss of trying to get the print to land in the right place on the label) and sticking them on slides is long gone - though I'm pretty sure I still have some slides that are still not labelled from pre 2005.  Nowadays the process is simply renaming the file.  There is still the same problem of correct identification of the species and place, and then spelling it correctly, so it still feels like labelling.  I try to label pictures soon after I download them, with either the species, family, or a place name, before I forget.

Although labelling doesn't necessarily mean looking critically at the pictures, it still gave me an excuse for throwing out some more substandard ones.  I don't like Canada geese so much that I want forty photos which are really slight variations from four situations, so I soon cut them down to a dozen.  And once the moths were labelled and sorted by filename, it was easier to throw out a few more of those too.

And the next job is key-wording.  I'm not trying to do all 20,000 pictures with a dozen words each.  Just start with simple words: bird, flower, mammal, etc.  Then select all the pictures without "insect" and go through finding a few that I've missed.  Now select all those "insects" and add another keyword: moth, butterfly, beetle, bee, dragonfly, etc.  Select all moths and butterflies, and add Lepidoptera.  All insects can have invertebrate added, but so can spiders, crabs and other things - maybe I should have done the key-wording in a different order, and somewhere there is an option for embedding parent and child keywords, so that a moth automatically has insect and invertebrate added - but I haven't quite worked out how to do that yet.

And having just looked again at the moth photos, I've seen another thirty that were labelled "moth" because they weren't identified at the time.  If they can't be identified now, they'll be thrown out.  I stopped photographing fungi a long time ago unless I could identify the species first. 

I won't be short of something to do for a while!!

Trying again

About thirty years ago I took some photos of snowdrops.  Unusually for me, especially at that time, I actually picked the flower, pegged it to the washing line, and set the camera looking up at it, with a background of blue sky.  I also took a picture or two with flash.  It was the days of film, and when the results eventually came back to me, I was quite surprised.  The two methods of lighting had given incredibly different results.

Both pictures were accepted by A-Z Botanical agency (they accepted everything I sent them) which has since gone through various owners and is now part of the Science Photo Library.  As they've put scanned versions on their website, I can at last see (and download) them again.

Now in the age of digital photography, I want to recreate, and improve on this picture.

This afternoon seemed ideal, the snowdrops were out and the sun was shining.

I picked a flower from the garden, used a plamp to secure it out of the wind and at a comfortably height with a blue sky background, and started taking pictures.

Clouds kept moving around the sky, and in the mid-afternoon sun, I was getting nothing like the blue sky of the original.

And no matter how I tried, I could not get the translucent effect on the outer petals, or the glistening of the left hand petal.

I tried using the macro flash to balance the white petals with the blue sky, but that didn't work either.

My conclusion is that either I was very lucky first time round, or I'm just so out of practice at using the camera that I haven't a clue what I'm doing any more.

I'll try to find time to have another go tomorrow - weather and flowers permitting!