Pablo’s Woodlife

After a week a very high winds, today was a bit calmer and in fact very sunny here in North Essex, but a little colder. Two projects today. One was to start testing my new camera. After a long time of putting up with one of first digital cameras to come out, I decided to upgrade. After a lot of research I decided to go for this Nikon Coolpix S4 camera. It has all the facilities of a reasonable standard SLR including good optical zoom (x10) and a macro facility whilst still being compact enough to put in a jacket pocket. A few other add-ons i.e. voice recording and movie capability give it the icing on the cake. The unique swivel lens is handy for framing awkward shots. The point and shoot mode is great for… er… pointing and shooting while there are several specialist modes like low light, landscape, high speed shutter, portrait etc etc. I must admit I wasn’t too creative today but just snapped away looking at the different settings. Yet another category appears on this blog! Photography.

My other mission was to try out fire-lighting in the very different conditions to last week. I wanted to see exactly just how much last weeks wet conditions affected normal fire-lighting. I used exactly the same wood for tinder and kindling as I did last week.

For a start it seemed to be easier just preparing the material in today’s conditions. I started with scraping birch bark and preparing some dry-ish wood into small feather sticks. After putting the kindling into a tent shape, I lit the tinder with the fire-steel and knife. Would you believe it, it caught on the second strike and I was able to feed it straight under the kindling where, again it caught well. Soon the fire, albeit a small one, was fully alight. All I had to do was add more moderately dry pieces of wood. What a difference a day or two of no rain makes. I was very surprised how quickly the wood had dried out. Well it was enough to make fire-lighting so much easier at any rate. Now all I have to do is keep practicing in the wet to become more adept at fire-lighting in any conditions.

I was still on the look out for the wood’s new residents; the deer. But I didn’t see them on this short excursion. I did however come across a bit of a gruesome discovery. I’ll post about this mid-week.

Thanks for the visit.

There’s just too much going on at the moment. It’s difficult to keep up with it all. I spent hours in Broaks wood just wandering along slowly trying to take everything in.

Greater Stitchwort.

Speckled wood butterfly. I also saw small cabbage whites, brimstones and orange tips.

The ponds are busy as well.

I think this is a recently hatched small red damselfly

I haven’t seen yellow archangel for a long time.

The show of bluebells never disappoint

They are iconic British woodland flowers

Why not show them off?

Wood avens or Herb Bennet, Wild strawberry, Bugle, Gorse, Herb Robert were all there as well.

Bird life was a little more difficult to see although I did catch a glimpse at a Nuthatch and I even saw a Swallow fly over.

My super-hearing detected a sound of movement in the leaf litter as I was watching the newts in a pond and I just managed to see a dark brown shape of a vole.

I also caught a glimpse of a Muntjac.

I followed the tracks and crotties for a while but lost them in amongst the undergrowth. There were some tiny tracks amongst them undoubtedy this years fawns but I didn’t see any.

Rain is forecast all next week. Who cares when the weekend is like this?

Thanks for the visit.

I went to Lowt’s wood for the first time in eight months. I haven’t been there before now because it’s quite a walk in and most of the wood is accessible only by climbing a steep slope. Having said that, it’s one of my favourite woods. It’s very quiet and despite being unmanaged, it looks nice.

I crept into the wood in case there was some Fallow deer about, but on this occasion there wasn’t. I meandered my way along the lower level and then climbed the steep slope to the higher parts of the wood. I stopped on the west side for a bit of lunch.

It was quiet with only a few birds and the distant mewing of a Buzzard. My lunch was bacon and eggs with beans cooked in the primus frying pan on my Optimus crux stove amongst the seeding heads of the spent Bluebells.

I took the opportunity to sort out my utility bag. I’m now carrying it in a drop bag so I can just put it any one of my rucksacks I take out with me.

After a bit of lunch I went to the south side of the wood and out into the field. The sun had come out and I was immediately attracted to the hedgerow where numerous insects had settled in the blazing heat.

Despite wanting to do a small carving project, I was kept fascinated by the comings and goings of the various insects, dragonfly and butterflies.

I spotted this Painted-lady speeding it’s way across the field and eventually it settled on the hedgerow. These come all the way from Africa. Apparently, they arrived in their thousands in May.

The dragonflies were represented by a single Common blue.

I spotted two types of caterpillar, the peacock butterfly (above) and large white butterfly.

The day ended with the usual snooze amongst the leaf litter back on the lower part of the wood before I headed home.

Thanks for the visit.

Pablo.

I went out today with the specific intention of finding and photographing a fox. I had to ask around.

Have you seen a fox? No, I thought not.

What about you? No I didn’t think so.

What about you? Been waiting a while too, eh?

What was that?

Did he go this way?

Or perhaps it was that way .

I get the distinct impression that someone’s having a laugh at my expense.

I’ve being playing with my new Canon EOS 500D camera all weekend, pretending I know what I’m doing.

I’ve had a SLR camera before in the old days of film, but I haven’t had a DSLR before.

Everyone takes pictures of rusty containers for some reason…do I win a prize? No. I thought not.

…and of course the obligatory sunset and birds picture (Rooks).

This is a tree. I should put some clever F stop and shutter speed info I suppose.

People also take close ups of berries don’t they?

…and the old blurred background thingy.

Watch my ears, watch my ears…

Keep watching…

Just building up enough speed…

There we go!!   The servo mode is quite good.

Okay, we’re bored with trees now. It because they don’t move isn’t it?

Ah yes… Note the way the picture leads you away from the foreground to the background. Still no prize?

Would you please stand still. This is a new bit of kit!! Give us a chance.

Oh well. Back to things that don’t move.

Thanks for the visit.

Pablo.