Under a Garden Log

As part of my project to record all the species in the garden, in winter I spend time photographing the fungi, mosses etc. Unfortunately a lot of them are very small stretching my macro capabilities. The first two are a couple of different crusts - very colorful with intricate scuplturing. I then located two very tiny slime mould fruiting bodies and a 3mm translucent white Spider/Harvestman plus other crusts and lichens. All will take some time (if ever to put a name to!!)

Lichens

As it was a very wet day yesterday, I decided to try some macrophotography on the lichens that I had collected from Toft Wood. These were on a black tile with black background lit by LED light. Probably better if the lichen are dry as the water has picked up a lot of reflections or lit from the side as in the first specimen  - work in progress for rainy days!!

New Year Flower Recording

The BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) run a New Year Plant hunt which I completed for Toft today, recording 16 species in flower.

Toft Full-Spectrum Images from Misty Frosty Day

Taken on 30th November - one of the very cold misty mornings with the Full-Spectrum camera. Mostly very muted colours but, in the denser part of the wood, the autumn colours recorded well saturated presumably as infrared was somewhat filtered out by the canopy. Ted was a bit bewildered by the very cold conditions and is about to zoom off round in circles,

 

Sunset Fox and Birds

When I first moved to Toft in the late 1960s, a favourite sunset walk was always to the rushy marshy area now occupied by the Meridian golf club which had a very large Reed Bunting roost in the winter. I thought when they built the golf club in 1983 that this would be dispersed but it just moved a short way to an area of farmland that is left in the winter as it is too wet to plough. As I approached the roost area I was aware of a large number of pheasants getting very agitated and it was only when I got home and looked at the photos that I realised they had seen the Fox before me! All the birds were very jittery but images of Reed buntings, Goldfinch and Fieldfare (we have dozens of these at the moment).