Birds from Northumberland Coast

A miscellany of birds seen during our week in Beadnell area (excluding Farne Islands), including Eider ducks, Little, Arctic, Common and Sandwich Terns, Fulmar, Herring Gull, Meadow Pipit, Reed Bunting, Ringe Plover and Kittiwakes. The weather has not been great for bird photography as generally needed iso 800.

Sea Creatures at Seahouses, Northumberland

Dabbling in rock pools searching out the strange variety of life that exists there brought back many happy childhood memories. The first creature is Botryllus schlosseri a colonial sea squirt. Each of the 'stars' comprises several individual sea squirts which share a central spout. This is repeated over the whole colony. They are all genetically identical repoducing by budding though they also have a motile sexual stage. Next comes a Sea Slug species with wonderful fluorescent blue tips to the tentacles. Also starring  Sea Anemones, Jelly fish, Sand Hoppers and Shrimps.

Flowers from Coastal Dunes Northumberland

There are a number of garden escapes growing in the sand dunes but, probably the most attractive, the cerise gladiolus is a native wild flower, along with Goat's Beard, Chives, Field Poppy and Meadow Thistle. The large numbers of Oriental Poppies and Knipofias are garden escapes.

Bamburgh Beach, Northumberland

These images were taken on Saturday when the morning rain cleared to give beautiful afternoon light. For some of the images where there is cloud movement, I was using to graduated filters (.9S and .6H) and a 10-stop neutral density to give 30 sec exposure. The first two image were with the 15mm fisheye (without filters!) and the last image with .9soft graduated only. Unfortunately yesterday was a complete washout with heavy rain and strong winds and today does not look much better so time to catch up on processing images!!

Shags, Puffins and Guillemots on the Farne Islands

As always the Puffins took centre stage on our visit to the Farne Islands but I also tried a few different approaches - wide angle on the Shags and head-on flight for Puffins and Guillemot, I captured a a passing Razorbill which was new for my flight shots and, my favourite of the day, an over-optimistic Guillemot attempting to push over the cliff.