New camera in the woods - bluebells and butterflies

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been getting to grips with my new camera, a Nikon D5300, and also some new software to process the photos, Adobe Lightroom. Anyway, I'm back now, and here's a selection of photos from the woods...

May is always a good month for butterflies, and now I can capture images of them in even higher resolutions! :-) Here's a Peacock sunning itself:

and also a female Orange Tip, which confusingly does not have orange-tipped wings like the male does...

The Brimstone butterflies are out too, and this one actually sat still for me:

Bees are out too - I think this one is a 'Large Red-tailed Humble Bee', but not too sure on that:

and I've no idea what this one is, as I've not got its whole body visible:

Dragonflies are beginning to appear as well:

But the birds are harder to photograph now, with the leaves hiding them, as with this Great Tit:

As well as the usual photos, I've also been trying some of the special features in my new camera. One of them is selective colouring, where you can pick up to three colours to include, with various parameters, leaving the rest of the picture in greyscale. For example, Bluebells with only the blue showing:

And again, but with blue and green this time:

It worked nicely on this daisy:

and also this Lesser Celandine (?):

I also tried a few using HDR (High Dynamic Range) plus a 'sketch' effect:

Plenty more to come in due course...

Mike

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August in the woods: logs and bugs

Thankfully it's been much sunnier this summer than last year, and there have been some good opportunities to photograph insects in the wayleave. I was particularly pleased with this shot of a male Souther Hawker dragonfly:

I got some more of another type of dragonfly too, but not sure what type it is:

Butterflies are also back in reasonable numbers, such as this Meadow Brown:

and this White Admiral (which was near our camp, rather than in the wayleave):

We've made use of the dry weather to finish moving logs back from further parts of the woods to near the camp:

We also squeezed a few chunky holly logs into the car to fill up the last little space in the firewood store at home:

Finally, here's a few views of sunshine in the woods, which was quite rare last year!

We've also have a few camping weekends, photos to come shortly from the most recent one...

Mike

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A couple of hours in the sun

Today we went to the wood and helped Butterfly Conservation in their survey of this year's migration of Painted Lady butterflies, which is the biggest for many years.
This involved sitting at the edge of the wayleave from 11:00-13:00
and counting all the Painted Ladies that flew across in front of us - they're going the same way, as they migrate North.
In all, we saw 77 in the two hours! We saw other cool insects as well, such as this damselfly:
and various dragonflies:
The other thing we were doing in the wood was checking the trail camera we'd left by the badger sett last night, but there was nothing apart from a video of me walking away from the camera and coming back to it! We've set it up again in a different place and with different sensitivity settings, so we'll see what we get... Anyway, I did at least get a nice photo of the moon last night:
Mike

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Shelter complete!

The shelter is now done! :-) Here's some pictures of it, and also of various bits of wildlife, including a mouse.

First, Tracy cut the ropes on the old shelter and I dragged the tarpaulin off:
Then I set about making pegs to fasten the tarpaulin down on the new shelter, while Tracy began moving stuff over.
Before long we had the cover staked down, and all the stuff organised into it:
The old shelter is just waiting for dismantling now. The bolts are all stainless steel, so hopefully I'll be able to reuse them, and the poles are birch so after a year standing up should be nice and dry for firewood!
The shelter doesn't seem to be too obtrusive, looking from either end of the coup we cut last winter, and certainly can't be seen from any public footpath:
The guys had been busy processing the oak offcuts into firewood:
There's only one oak log left to be converted now:
While we were out in the wayleave we heard a snapping sound every 20 seconds or so. A dim and distant memory from the garden of a house I lived in many years ago led me to the nearby Broom bush:
So what was making the noise? Here's a seed pod with the seeds still in it:
and here's a seed pod after the heat of the sun has made it go "snap", flinging the seeds away from the plant to start a new life somewhere nearby:
Also out in the wayleave were a Gatekeeper and a dragonfly:
Finally we went over to the pond for Tracy to dump some willow in it to soak, so she can try making a basket in a couple of weeks:
One the way back to the car, something small ran across the ride in front of us. It was a mouse! It hid between some logs and pretended we couldn't see it:
But then it did a runner:
after which it was kind enough to sit still while I took a couple more pictures:

We're hoping to go badger watching again tonight, depending on the weather.

Mike

UPDATE: links to posts on building the shelter:
http://peplers.blogspot.com/2008/07/shelter-building-and-nuthatch.html
http://peplers.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-shelter-building.html
http://peplers.blogspot.com/2008/07/shelter-frame-finished.html

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