Tag: Tim Melling

Tim writes: Merlins are scarce breeders on moorlands, mainly in the north but they do breed in places like Dartmoor.  They usually nest on the ground among deep heather but will sometimes use old crow’s nests in trees.  I photographed this adult female dashing rapidly over the Peak District Moors.  They use this turn of…

  Tim writes: Twite (Linaria flavirostris) are scarce and extremely localised breeding birds.  The main population is in Scotland but in England they are almost wholly restricted to the South Pennines where fewer than a hundred pairs breed.  They are one of just two British songbirds that feed almost exclusively on seeds, the other being…

  Tim writes:  Most people think of Nightjar as a bird of lowland heaths but this one was high in the Pennines at well over 1000 feet above sea level in Yorkshire.  The second half of May is my usual time for Nightjars but ill-health meant I wasn’t fit enough this year.  So I went…

  Tim writes: I visited Smardale Gill in Cumbria in late July and managed to find several Scotch Argus (Erebia aethiops) butterflies just emerging.  This male is absolutely pristine with not a scratch nor scale out of place.  It still has that iridescent bloom that freshly emerged butterflies show, but which disappears after a few…

  Tim writes: I’m sure that many of you will have seen the surprising news announced recently that Britain has a new species of snake; Barred Grass Snake (Natrix helvetica).  Without exception, every media source announced that this was an additional species for Britain, bringing the total to four (Barred Grass Snake, Grass Snake, Smooth…

Tim writes: This photograph was a lot more difficult to take than it looks.  Once a Skylark has started to sing he rises up and rarely comes down.  And when he does appear, it is usually too far away to capture.  I photographed this one early morning after a night of heavy rain.  This hay…

  Tim writes:  I suppose the most unusual thing about this photograph is that it was not photographed in a reedbed.  In winter they are supposed to feed mainly on the seeds of Common Reed (Phragmites australis) but I found a flock feeding in a rough field near to a reedbed in North Lincolnshire.  It…

  Tim writes: In 1897 two German Ornithologists (Ernst Hartert and Otto Kleinschmidt) were looking  through a series of Marsh Tits in the British Museum when they spotted a couple of Willow Tits that had been wrongly labelled.  The same year some fresh specimens were collected in Coalfell Wood, Finchley and three years later Willow…

Tim writes:  I took this photograph at Bretton Lakes in West Yorkshire in late January.  It was a warm, muggy, winter’s day, but the previous few days had been really cold and the lakes had frozen over.  But the warmer weather had melted much of the ice and a layer of melt water lay on…

  Tim writes: Hudsonian Godwit is quite a scarce North American shorebird and is classed as near-threatened by IUCN.  It breeds only in five well scattered areas ranging from northern Alaska to the shores of Hudson Bay.  It winters in southern South America but has regular stopover sites in North America, including southern Alaska where…