Many birds are already paired up and nest building including Grey Herons and Cormorants at Paxton. Mostly the birds manage courtship in a dignified way even with long wings to keep free of the branches etc but the overenthusiastic Coot shows what can go wrong if you watch too much Winter Olympics or jet ski racing!
Apart from the roses and inks that starred in the previous blog, we also played around with models and backgrounds, some dichroic cubes with laser torch, crystal ball, CDs etc. The Cambridge background was taken and printed by me around 1999 so you might be able to spot some differences to now.
Being Valentine's Day, thought it appropriate to provide roses as one of the subjects for our Creative Photography Day for Cambridge Camera Club. They were photographed in Light Tents, immersed in water with coloured and gold inks, lit with UV light and used in Multiple Exposure shots. One of the examples from the double exposure is the first and favourite shot
As I needed to go to the Surgery in Bourn this morning and it wasn't raining, I walked over via the edge of the golf course where there is a well-established Hawthorn hedge which yielded quite a few clumps of Fungi, a couple of Slime moulds and several vibrant lichen species. There was a lot of water in the Bourn Brook but fortunately no flooding on the walk.
A very enjoyable walk around Trumpington Meadows with Ian Webb, the Community Conservation Officer at The Wildlife Trust who manage the Reserve. A few fungi (Psathyrella spp, Hare'sFoot Inkcap) lichen (Physcia aipolia) were noted plus lots of emerging meadow plant species.
One of the projects on the Reserve is the construction of Butterfly Banks (also trialled at other UK reserves Journal of Insect Conservation | Springer Nature Link). These are E-shaped mounds that offer butterflies etc the choice of shade and sun and also different set ups are orientated to give north, south, east and west choices. One project showed that the extreme high temperatures experienced in the UK in July 2022 resulted in a community of butterflies becoming inactive in the open areas, unable to fly, feed or mate during this period, but that the shaded areas provided places where they could continue their activities. Work on other invertebrate species using pit traps showed remarkable differences between the hot sunny banks and the shaded areas. This suggests that producing artificial slopes and integrating patches of scrub within grassland could create an array of microclimates that allow butterflies and other invertebrates to thermoregulate, providing a refuge during extreme weather events so helping counter some of the negative impacts of rising temperatures and extreme weather events. In particular, this might help stem the decline of our northern species of butterflies and other inverts as global warming progresses.
