Standing up for Nature
Tim writes: For much of the 20th Century nobody had been able to find a nest of Marbled Murrelet. By the mid twentieth century the National Audubon Society was even offering $100 reward for the finder of the first documented nest as all other nests of North American birds had been found by this…
Tim writes: Sometimes whale blows look photogenic, sometimes they do not. When I was in Alaska I spotted that the perfect situation arose for taking whale blows so I seized the opportunity. These circumstances were no wind, early morning backlighting, plus a dark background to accentuate the blow. And here is the result on a…
Tim writes: Rufous Hummingbirds are a western North American bird and breed further north than any other species of Hummingbird. This one is a male showing off his iridescent throat which is created by interference colours not pigment (like rainbows or oil in a puddle). I photographed him very early morning in a dark forest…
Tim writes: Iceland is the only breeding site for Barrow’s Goldeneye outside of North America. I photographed this flying male in Alaska where it was common. It was named in honour of Sir John Barrow from the Admiralty who sponsored many Arctic expeditions during the nineteenth century. Barrow’s Goldeneye differs from Common Goldeneye by the…
Ethiopian Wolves (Canis simensis) are the rarest Canid on the planet with a population of around just five hundred individuals. Most of these are found in the Bale Mountains but a second population occurs further north in the Simien Mountains. Interbreeding with feral dogs is one problem, but they have also caught rabies and distemper…
Tim writes: Apart from being the sole European representative of a tropical family of butterflies, Duke of Burgundy has another unusual attribute. Males and females have a different number of legs. Everyone knows that all insects have six legs, but sometimes they are reduced to become vestigial appendages, hardly visible at all. This is exactly…
Tim writes: Also known as the Bearded Vulture, the Lammergeier is the only animal on the planet known to feed almost exclusively on bones. It has an extremely acidic stomach (with a pH of around 1) that can dissolve bones and the high fat content marrow inside. Even the young nestlings are fed on small…
Lanner Falcons are scarce breeding birds in Europe but they are more numerous in sub-Saharan Africa. So it was a species I was hoping to see and photograph in Ethiopia but I got better than I could have hoped for. This male was flying round at eye-level in the morning sunshine with steep nesting cliffs…
This is the White-headed Vulture (Trigonoceps occipitalis) which is rare and declining throughout its range. It has been classified as critically endangered by IUCN, which is the highest category before extinction in the wild. Although it is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa it is always scarce and at low density. Being a vulture it feeds on…
The song of the Yellowhammer is supposed to sound like “a little bit of bread and no cheese”. It was Enid Blyton who popularised this rendition of the song in several of her books and poems (eg The Yellowhammer Bird in Enid Blyton’s Nature Lover’s Handbook 1944). This is another seriously depleted farmland bird that…