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Spring 2025 arrives

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Five years ago we were facing up to the Covid-19 lockdowns. In response to the stay-at-home orders I began a weekly macro blog, an assignment from the gods? No, just our Supreme Leader at the time Boris Johnson and his better half in Public Health Chris Whitty.

While I can’t promise weekly blogs due to work and life commitments, it’s definitely time to dust off the macro lens after its winter slumber and step out into the garden to see what’s happening!

As ever, there’s far more going on than you might think. I also think it’s important that we look at and try to understand invertebrates when this misinformation is coming from the leader of the country (I know it could be worse, but get your facts straight, folks).

We depend on nature and our ecosystems and their wildlife for our food, clean water, fresh air and function. Wildlife has a right to exist and the world does not revolve around our species.

The snails are roosting in our front porch. My wife was wondering if they might be too hot there, as the paint’s white and it can get quite sweltry in there.

It looks to me like something is going on with the shells and they may be roosting to grow their shells. It’s not something I know much about. Please let me know in the comments if you have any info 🙂

We have some nice pansies my wife planted out by our front door. You can see the bee drive-in here with the dark landing marks and the brush of hairs to ensure the pollen of other pansies are retrieved from a visiting bee.

The broom plant flowers in a subtle way, these little yellow petals appearing from the red sepals.

This is a common little fly that seems to stand around on leaves and petals for ages!

Their eyes are very cool, and I enjoyed the single spot in their wings as well. These flowers are some saxifrages my wife bought from the garden centre.

In January on a cold Saturday afternoon I laid or ‘plashed’ the hazel shrub I had planted out in our hedge. It’s a little hedge, but the usual shrub that made up the hedge has died back so I needed to take action. It’s so pleasing (‘pleaching’?) to see the hazel respond so well and new shoots to appear from the lain-down stems.

I also uprooted a sapling that a squirrel had cached as a seed, which is doing well. I planted this out around the time of frosts, which shows hazel’s hardiness. I did know that was the case, but it’s nice to see it come through.

The normal hedge I mentioned is this Skimmia japonica. It’s good for pollinators, no doubt. But it doesn’t seem to last well without pruning.

It was abuzz with drone flies as spring really began to arrive in mid-late March.

These drone flies (Eristalis) are probably the most common winged-insect in our garden at the moment. They’re quite funny I think.

Bay flowers promise so much, but they are quite modest really. I am hoping this provides some decent nectar for any invertebrate that needs it.

I spotted this little crab spider hanging out on one of my thermal t-shirts. It’s probably Misumena vatia, the most common of the crab spiders.

A cat monument in our garden in memory of our cat Kaiser who loved this spot in the flowerbed. The wolf spiders also love this spot because it gets so warm. The white stone of the cat is even warmer than the surrounding soil. I think this may be a male and a female wolf spider, with the male the smaller of the two, with the palps (dark spots at the front of its head, in the cat’s eye!).

The fence next to the cat monument was a helpful basking spot for the first nursery web spider I’ve seen so far this year.

The flowering of our magnolia is short and sharp, but these globular flowers are a delight. Magnolias are very old trees in evolutionary terms, and here’s to another year under their belts.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

Sussex Weald: song thrush rules

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk in my local slice of the Sussex Weald before work in recent weeks. The impact it has on my brain, body and soul is profound, having lost my connection with woodland somewhat recently.

Early spring is a special time in woodland, watching the the leaves appear, the first spring birds, and the woodland flowers. It is so much better than those hot, shady and sterile days of summer, in my view.

The chiffchaffs have been arriving, but the song thrush rules this chunk of the Weald. Its repeated phrases echo through the still leafless branches.

Wild branches against ranks of pine and birch.

Those birches, growing on old heathland, waiting for the onset of new leaves.

A birch tree harassed by honeysuckle, catching the morning light.

A green beech tree with lots of moss and algae.

The ride, with pines reaching across on either side.

Silver birches among bluebell leaves.

An old beech tree.

Bluebell leaves appearing below a mess of beech twigs and old leaves.

The grassy banks of the woodland ride. I often hear firecrest singing along these edges where the ivy climbs and a few evergreen trees like the cypresses grow.

Thanks for reading.

Dartmoor waxcaps

Daniel Greenwood6 Comments

This is a showcase of the posh mushroom pics I gathered with my proper camera during a visit to the wonderful Dartmoor National Park in November 2024. Mad props to my wife who is chief squirrel during these Devonian photo forages.

The photos were taken on Sunday 10th November 2024.

I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of fungi. If you enjoy reading them you can support my blog here.

A reminder that I am not encouraging people to pick or remove mushrooms in these areas. You could very easily clear all the mushrooms we saw within minutes. I think that would be sad because it would mean other people wouldn’t get to see them and learn or be inspired by them. I think with rare species like waxcaps that are featured here, we should be taking photos and submitting them to apps like iNaturalist or Plantlife’s waxcap campaign. In some areas that would be illegal anyway, due to site protections.

While I don’t believe 2024 will go down as a vintage mushroom season, there were a lot of lovely waxcaps to be found on the moor in a place we’ve been visiting since 2016. Moorlands seem to be quite good for waxcaps, not that I know why, and also for lichens because they are rocky, wet and the air is fresh.

I’ll post the images in chronological order for my own sanity.

This is the landscape where the fungi lived – moorland with a view towards the Teign estuary.

The first fungal find were these eyelash cups (Scutellinia) growing on animal dung! Plenty more dungi to come.

Waxcaps make up the crux of the mushrooms we found. These beauties are butter waxcaps (Hygrocybe ceracea).

Not to be outdone, some very photogenic sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare) were found as we climbed the moor.

These mottlegills (Panaeolus) are quite common in places with grazing livestock like Dartmoor ponies.

My best guess is that this was one of the moss bells (Galerina).

These lichens are beautiful. I don’t see them very often because I have to travel west see moorland. They’re probably gritty British soldier lichens (Cladonia floerkeana).

I’m unsure what this species is, but it’s a beauty.

As we approached the more remote moorland (in terms of people living out there) the waxcaps began to appear in the cropped turf. This is another example of how important grazing to some degree is, and how it mimics very ancient processes. These mushrooms would not grow in closed-canopy woodlands.

This is one of the red waxcaps, but I’m unsure if it’s honey waxcap or not. It looks too orange for scarlet waxcap.

This is one of several species under the umbrella of blackening waxcap or witches’ bonnet (Hygrocybe conica complex).

This isn’t an award winning image but it’s likely to be meadow coral (Calvulinopsis corniculata).

This is a species I only really see in the west of England or Ireland. It’s one of the dog lichens (Peltigera).

These are crimson waxcaps (Hygrocybe punicea), stunning mushrooms indeed. There were some young men passing by who stopped to admire the colours of these impressive shrooms.

I don’t have an identification yet for this gorgeous waxcap and the closest I can guess is a colour variation of parrot waxcap (Gliophorus psittacinus).

This is meadow waxcap (Hygrocybe pratensis), often fan-like, always best photographed from ground level.

I think this is golden waxcap (Hygrocybe chlorophana).

Now we’re back at the dungi. This was a very small mushroom, growing on a rabbit or hare dropping.

These are probably dung roundhead (Protostropharia semigloblata). Despite the animal dung, they’re beautiful!

I’m not up on my corals and suchlike, but these are probably in this family.

The walk ended in a little graveyard, great places for waxcaps, by the way. That was evidenced again by this clutch of what I would say were scarlet waxcaps (Hygrocybe coccinea).

Phew!

Thanks for reading.

I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of fungi. If you enjoy reading them you can support my blog here.

How d’ya like them puffballs, Google?

Daniel Greenwood5 Comments

This time five years ago I was hunkering down into my Macro Monday blog series as the pandemic locked down on us all. Now we are at the short end of the lean mushroom season. Spring is about to, well, spring, so the temperatures will rise and fungi will fruit again in modest numbers.

With that in mind, I made a right fool of myself with my neighbour this week. But then again, at least I’m not threatening them with military invasion and putting tariffs on the bird identification information I share.

No, instead I got excited about what I thought was false puffball (Enteridium lycoperdon), a species of slime mould (not actually fungi, but growing in the same way and places) that can be observed at this time of year.

On the way out for my morning walk, I spotted some white mushrooming thing at the bottom of my neighbour’s fencepost. Wow, I thought, false puffball on our doorstep!

The organism was white, had appeared quite quickly, and was growing in a damp location on decaying wood. Perfect!

I sent some photos over to my neighbour to say what I’d seen. Obviously he had no idea what I was on about, and so he checked with his roofer who confirmed they had sprayed expanding foam (in two seriously random locations, in my defence) while working on the house the other day.

If false puffball is what it says it is, does that now mean that expanding foam is false false puffball?

For comparison, here’s the real thing from back in that fateful month of March 2020:

One thing I have learned from this process of misidentification is that my blog appears quite high up in the rankings on Google for ‘false puffball’. It comes at a time when Google emailed me to ask if they could feature some of my photos on their store blog and do an interview.

‘What’s in it for me and my phone,’ I asked.

One of the richest companies in the world, and it turns out they don’t want to pay to use your images or harness your knowledge and experience. What a bunch of puffballs. I hope you appreciate it’s the principle here that matters. Remember those, principles?

So it goes that the only way I have ever been paid as a photographer is when you lovely people ‘buy me coffee’ via my Ko-fi page. Thank you to everyone who has supported me.

Anyway, I hope Google like these absolutely stunning false puffball images. Shot on a Gaggle Tinsel 35c. Feel free to use guys! 🙂

Thanks for reading.

Snapshots of Salzburg 🧂

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

In May 2024 I visited Salzburg in Austria for the first time. It’s a beautiful city in a wonderful part of Europe. The photos are taken with my Olympus EM-1 Mark III with a sprinkle of my Olympus TG-6 compact, and Pixel 7a.

One of my wife’s prerequisites for the visit (part of our honeymoon rail adventure – see Swiss Alps posts) was to attend the Sound of Music tour which begins in Salzburg. I love the film (thanks to my friend and blog reader Allison for lending me the DVD), but admit to remaining silent on that bus!

The building above is Schloss Leopoldskron and was used in the film, combined with another location. In the distance you can see the hill of Gaisberg which lurks throughout this post.

Just outside the city centre we were driven to Schloss Hellbrunn and the famous gazebo where ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ was set. The scene inside the gazebo was a set as it was too small for actual dancing.

Our excellent guide finished the tour (which takes you much further outside Salzburg) at the Mirabelle Palace Gardens. In the distance you can see the iconic Hohensalzburg Fortress.

Here’s the Hohensalzburg Fortress in spectacular light after heavy rain later that evening. Taken with my Olympus TG6 compact camera.

The evening light falling across one of several bridges that connects the old and new towns of Salzberg, crossing the Salzbach river.

The reverse view to the north-west.

The following morning we passed the St. Sebastian Church, sited along a pedestrianised street. Mozart’s father and wife are buried in the cemetery here.

The Old Fox was a pub we ate at later that evening, as we have a penchant for foxes (not eating them). The food was good, but like many places in Austria their approach to accommodating and supporting people with nut allergies needs work. It’s a lovely old pub inside and out.

Mülln Parish Church seen from one of the bridges across the Salzach. The hill here is the outcrop that holds the Fortress.

I think this is my favourite image that I captured from Salzburg. It shows so much of the city’s character, including the ancient heritage, layers of architecture, a cable car (very useful in Austria), and the life of the place. The processing is maybe a bit harsh.

Inside the Fortress walls, now a major tourist attraction. Of course there’s a lime tree, it is central-eastern Europe after all.

The views of the Salzkammergut mountains from the Fortress are spectacular.

The Salzach river snaking away to the north and north-west where it becomes the boundary between Bavaria (Germany) and Austria. It eventually finds its way into the mighty river Inn.

This is the first view in this post of Salzburg Cathedral, originally built in the 700s.

The cathedral has been restored after it was bombed by the Allies in October 1944 as the Second World War reached its climax. Many thousands of people, including civilians, lost their lives in the British and American bombings of Austria and Germany.

The towers were reconstructed by 1959.

The cemetery near the cathedral is a lovely, quiet spot. This is a Pixel 7a pic, hence the fancy colours.

There are many lovely towers to see in Salzburg. Here you can see evidence of how green the city is, looking into the mountains.

Gaisberg as seen on the approach to the monastery, with a Sound of Music fan eagerly making their way there.

Stiegl was the nicest beer that I tried during our time in Austria. It’s a wheat beer. This is one of their breweries and apparently dates back in part to the 1400s.

We walked up from the city to the Benedictine Abbey of Nonnberg, another location for The South of Music.

The view from our hotel room was special, mixing Salzburg architecture with the surrounding peaks of Salzburgerland. An almighty storm arrived not long after this photo was taken.

Looking from another window in our room, the clouds drifted over Gaisberg.

Thanks for reading.

I write these blogs in my spare time because I want to raise awareness about the beauty and diversity of our landscapes. If you enjoy reading them you can support my blog here.

Swiss Alps: where sycamore trees feel at home

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Continuing my series of posts about visiting the Jungfrau region of the Swiss Alps in May 2024, this one focuses on the sycamore trees which are so abundant there. They were seen on a short but constantly ascending walk at the foot of the Wetterhorn.

If you want to do this 3-mile walk for yourself, it begins in Grindelwald and ends at the owl sanctuary/mountain café with a return bus available at the end. This is the route we took (ignore the starting point, just begin anywhere in Grindelwald):

I’ve posted a couple of times about the sycamore tree (Acer pseudoplatanus) as I think it straddles that special boundary between human culture and wildness that is probably my creative sweet-spot. In Britain sycamore is at once reviled by nature conservation puritans, accepted by rewilding pragmatists, and held as a symbol for the British love of trees in the form of the illegally felled and now martyred Sycamore Gap tree.

In the Bernese Oberland I saw sycamores playing a fundamental role in cultural landscapes at the foot of the Wetterhorn, one of the Jungfrau’s towering peaks.

What do I mean by cultural landscapes? My understanding and use here indicates a landscape that remains wild or ‘natural’ but with a heavy human influence still. English national parks are cultural landscapes, whereas those managed by wolves and grazing animals without human management plans in North America, are ‘wildernesses’. That in itself is questionable from a Native American perspective, but another blog.

There isn’t a lot of information about sycamore wood pasture as a cultural landscape but for this dissertation about sycamore wood pasture in the Northern Alps.

The Wetterhorn seen above meadows of yellow rattle, and kidney vetch, both growing in profusion.

I posted more generally about the meadows of Grindelwald (a mile west of this location) here:

Swiss Alps: Grindelwald’s magnificent meadows 🦗

A reminder that you shouldn’t pick flowers, trample on them, or knowingly disturb wildlife or livestock in these extremely sensitive places. In terms of you being trampled, cattle were behind electric fencing where present.

The cattle are an iconic element of these landscapes in the Alps, and provide an important role in grazing the grasslands.

The signage is impressive in Switzerland, some provide hours and minutes route descriptions of destinations. Not something I’d seen before, but now there’s no going back, or at least if there is, you will know how long it takes!

The walk crosses the Horbach river at least once.

A large, moss and lichen-covered ash tree (Fraxinus) showing no signs of ash dieback disease, thankfully.

It was nice to see some roughness and history in what is an otherwise ‘spick and span’ setting. I presume the huts are built on stone to prevent rising damp decaying the timber frame.

Spiked rampion was a new plant for us. Apparently it’s endangered in the UK. It was growing in woodlands and meadows around the Grindelwald area.

His a mighty view of the Horbach looking towards the Eiger.

Red-banded polypore is common in continental Europe but not as easy to find in the UK, so I always enjoy seeing it.

I love woodland ponds, especially ones as wild and dynamic as this one. This is probably an ancient pond.

After this point you reach a hotel which I didn’t take any photos of. It’s a good place to have a hearty meal. Just don’t expect to charge any devices, we heard an English couple seemingly fall out with the staff over that. Oops.

After stopping at the hotel you pass this incredible cut in the mountain side. The rock looks twisted and dramatically compressed. There’s a small quarry in operation, glimpsed in the right hand corner.

These walks always involve huts belonging to local people. What a life that once would have been.

After this hut we turned into the sycamore wood pasture.

I know very little about mountain hydrology and the role that meltwater plays in feeding ecosystems lower down. But looking at the lushness of this meadows makes me wonder about how the ice melt provides such a fertile location for grassland, and sycamores. Sycamores do well in damp conditions, but not too wet.

Other lifeforms that enjoy wet conditions are of course mosses. They’re thick on this trunk. I didn’t spend any time attempting to identify any.

Fairy foxglove (Erinus alpinus) is another new plant we encountered. It was growing on the footpath.

A view into what I think is the Upper Grindelwald Glacier (Oberer Grindelwaldgletscher).

Walking in such an awesome location can feel rather overwhelming.

View north-east with a group of moss-darkened sycamores before growths of spruce. I think the peaks beyond the snowy tops can be reached by walking into the Grindelwald First gondola, accessible via the town centre.

A view south-west towards the Eiger ridge.

An old pollard sycamore coming into leaf for another year. The trunk is thick with moss and no doubt with lichen and algae too.

The Eiger Trail passes up here over the snow but it was closed due to rockfall.

Early-purple orchid was not a common sighting during our time in the Alps, so seeing one against the vista of Grindelwald was nice.

Looking west towards Männlichen (see post here).

I was intrigued by these stone walls, reminding me of forgotten settlements seen in Ireland, Scotland, Dartmoor or Yorkshire. It’s a contrast with the tidy timbers of Grindelwald.

The walk ends at this lovely cafe on the road, across from the bird sanctuary.

Some old shoes on display. Made with sycamore wood?

Just a few of the treats on offer.

There aren’t many cafes that can beat this view.

The Alpine Bird sanctuary (Alpenvogel Park), home to capercaillie, eagle owl, snowy owl, long-eared and tawny owls.

Thanks for reading.

Hoar frost days ❄️

Daniel Greenwood8 Comments

West Sussex, January 2025

One of the nice things about not living in a city is that you get to see hoar frost. I know this because I’ve spent most of my life in cities where the ‘heat island effect’ usually won’t allow for hoar frost to really develop during daylight hours.

Bramble leaves make it through the winter, providing a good platform for these frost spikes.

This thick frost covers the trees and hedges, everything vegetative really, in a thin veil of icing. The puddles become milky ice clouds.

After a very dark, grey and damp December, these blue skies and frosty landscapes have been welcome relief.

Not a great time to sit on a bench though.

This is a reed with a coating of frost.

Remarkably this oak tree still holds its leaves, which is unusual outside of cities in January. I have known deciduous oaks to hold leaves into January in London.

I always seek them out in this weather, especially with a little bit of backlighting. This is quite a heavy crop so the sharpness is lessened a bit. You probably don’t care.

That distant landscape is actually an equestrian estate. It is chewed to within an inch of its life, hence the black sticks of trees, compared to the rough grassland where I stood to take the photo.

Thanks for reading.

Dublin: ‘I float down the Liffey’ 🇮🇪

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

The River Liffey, Dublin, March 2024

2025 will be a year of catching up on last year’s photos. 2024 was a really busy year of travel and life events after the fallow pandemic years (2020-22).

I was in Dublin in March 2023 for – you guessed it – my stag weekend. It was more a spiritual visit, made by ferry, rather than an idiots’ weekend away. This post wouldn’t have been possible without my best man Liam’s work in booking the boat tour, the only one on the river.

For the visit I took my Olympus TG-6 Tough compact camera, but didn’t take photos as raw files so these are edited jpegs, which is obviously a crime against photography. The images from the water are taken through glass, so they have degraded even more (you probably won’t notice). The light was nice though, and image quality isn’t everything.

The title of this blog is a pointer to a lyric in the Radiohead song How to disappear completely.

Passing the Liffey is carved into my memories of Dublin having travelled so many times on the ferry, across and along the river in the car after disembarking. It’s also where my parents bought me my first Everton shirt in 1995.

We were staying on the north side of the Liffey, the older part of Dublin.

Who doesn’t like some unofficial street sculpture – if it’s fly-tipping that’s obviously different. Now for a handbrake turn:

The Famine Sculptures are one of the most striking installations along the Liffey. They act to remind us of the millions of people forced to emigrate or leave their homes during the Great Famine (1845-49). It is a shocking event in British and Irish history and too few people in Britain are educated about it.

I don’t mean that from a place of “victimhood”, as one true British patriot put it to me once. It’s just that I’ve come to appreciate that the understanding of Irish history is very poor in Britain. Irish history is British history, too. There is so much more we could have learned in school about the role of the British Empire and how it explains the country we find ourselves in today.

On a lighter note, this Saturday Night Live sketch with Paul Mescal poking fun at those of us with ‘Irish ancestry’ is very funny:

From a personal perspective the famine drove my Mayo ancestors to attempt new lives in North America. The statues here are in place alongside where one of the “famine ships”, the “Jeanie Johnston” departed for New York:

The original Jeanie Johnston carried 2,500 Irish emigrants across 16 journeys to North America during the Famine.

You can see the Jeanie Johnston moored in the left-hand side of the image below right.

This is the Harp or Samuel Beckett Bridge, looking out towards the Irish Sea. The harp is a significant symbol in Irish national identity. During a walking tour we learned that the Irish government had to get permission from Guinness to use the harp as its national emblem, and with restrictions on how it could be employed.

Custom House dominates part of the north bank of the Liffey. It was burnt down in 1921 as the Irish Republican Army attempted to destroy tax records in a raid.

This building once managed the movement of goods up the Liffey into Ireland.

And here it is from street level. The tent on the left is where a person was rough sleeping. We were told that the river was once significantly wider than it is now.

Two swans in the river on the other side – taken a good half an hour later, don’t worry.

At first this tower looked disused but I’m not sure if it is. The banner’s related to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza (at least 2023-present day). Ireland is outspoken on the need for a ceasefire, a two-state solution and for an end to the Israeli military’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The banner seems to have the name of SIPTU – a trade union – branded on it. For the those who aren’t aware, the Palestinian cause is one of the most significant humanitarian and political issues for ‘the left’ in Britain and Ireland, probably more so than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This barrel of a building is the Convention Centre, opened to the public in 2010.

This is the Dockland Campus of the Central Bank of Ireland. The design on the side is supposed to give the impression of leaves rustling (or something) but it didn’t see that when we passed it.

Here are some chilled out Saturday drinkers on the south side of the river.

I’ve got a post to come with images from the ferry leaving Dublin in August 2024, featuring seals, gulls and some interesting old buildings.

Thanks for reading.

My 2024 in photography

Daniel Greenwood6 Comments

Another year completed and lessons learned. Creatively I have found a balance with my equipment and the actual process of photography. I’m into my 6th year of working with Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses, giving more space to enjoy the process of gathering photos – walking – because the equipment is light.

Cameras used include Olympus EM-5 Mark III, Oly EM-1 Mark III, Olympus TG-6 Tough compact camera, and Pixel 7a phone camera.

These photos should show the range of things I like to take pics of – not just mushrooms! 😂

With the privileges available to me – health, location, resources, freedom of expression – here are my photographic highlights of 2024:

January

I did a couple of long walks in Sussex at the beginning of the year, exploring some new locations around the South Downs. I visited St. Botolphs church for the first time, one of Sussex’s special ones among thousands of already significant churches. Last year I set up a gallery for my fledging church photographs project which can be viewed here.

February

This felt like the moment of the light returning after the dark winter months. The Downs at Amberley are my gateway to the South Downs, and walking here is always worth the gentle climb.

March

In March I visited Dublin for a weekend and took in the sights along the great river Liffey.

For a friend’s birthday we spent the weekend in York, which gave me a chance to take some compact camera pics of a few of the oak timber framed buildings. I’ve added a gallery for my ‘Oak Timbers’ project here.

April

I got married in April so there wasn’t time for much beyond the odd local walk. I was trying out my new Pixel 7a, bought because of its value and reported image quality. The camera is spectacular, I just wish it wasn’t a G**gle product. I blogged about it here.

May

Ah, memories. In May we went on our honeymoon to Austria and Switzerland, all by train. You may be sick of reading about that! I am definitely not sick of blogging about it though!

This was one of those one-off photos experiences. Thankfully the weather held and we saw the mountains in much of their glory.

June

A bit of a lost month for photography because I started (yet another) new job and had to settle into a new routine. The highlight was probably these sawfly larvae which ate through some of the leaves on my gooseberry. Blog here.

July

“July, July, it never seemed so strange”, as the Decemberists sang. I caught Covid and didn’t really get back to normal for 3 months afterwards (Vitamin D is very important, people). My macro work was reduced by the evil contagion but I did find some nice bugs near home to share.

August

I managed to pap some pretty fine inverts in August, with this beautiful ichneumon wasp seen in my garden. I’ve not got anywhere near enough out of my Olympus EM-1 Mark iii and 60mm macro, but this showed just how good Micro Four Thirds cameras are for macro.

Another strongpoint for M43 cameras is that they can ‘stack’ images internally, something now copied by the big hitters. This is a composite of about 10 photos the camera has laced together to ensure the depth of field covers a deeper focus range. It means more of the, rather gruesome, subject can be seen in detail.

September

In September I made my first ever visit to the iconic sea stacks at Downpatrick Head on the North Mayo Coast in Ireland. Mayo has an international dark skies designation so I was able to mess around with the Milky Way. But for the astro photo I haven’t processed these images yet so here are a couple of phone photos.

October

As I have lamented on my Fungi Friday blog, 2024 was not the best mushroom season. But there are always things to find out there. I found this knocked over fly agaric, which was in perfect condition, ready for its portrait.

November

Autumn is a time for Dartmoor for me and my wife, and despite colds we managed some walks onto the moors in the National Park. We found an amazing array of waxcaps, like the crimsons above, which you can see in full on Fungi Friday.

On the last day of November I hiked with my South Downs amigo from Ditchling into the mist. This is the much-photographed Ditchling dew pond, shrouded in mist.

December

The weather in December was very grey and damp, and all the Christmas demands gave me only one meaningful walk – to Pulborough Brooks in West Sussex.

Thanks for all your support in 2024 and wishing you peace and happiness in 2025.

Are we now at war with the newts?

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Here we go again.

A few years ago I read Karel Čapek’s At War with the Newts. I can’t remember much of this absurdist Czech novel, and to be honest I struggled with it. It was not exactly grounded in ecology which all great novels must be. Kidding.

However, when the political news-cycle pedals round to how difficult politicians find it to build houses or appease the masses, I think of this book.

Why? Last week the current government blamed newts and bats for holding up major infrastructure development, economic growth, and therefore stopping cash entering the people’s pocket.

Why are newts (great crested, in this case) and bats getting stick? It’s because they have ‘strict’ protections (which are apparently very poorly applied, by the way) that can defer or even stop developments. Just ask our previous but three Great Leader.

It’s funny because he also went there.

Bats have strict protections because some species have declined by 99% since 1945. Newts and bats have no meaningful place in our lives unless you hold on to fond childhood memories or you’re an ecologist. This makes them fodder for politicians looking to distract.

I don’t see anyone decrying owls for their role in the cost of living crisis (yet).

And you definitely don’t see people going after that lovely snoring dormouse, another licenced species.

The protections we have for what little wildlife we have left in the UK are so weak, and so pitifully enforced, that it just beggars belief politicians will go after wildlife in this way.

It’s somewhat surprising the current government has gone there at all, let alone so early in their tenure. But who else has singled-out species for holding back economic development? You guessed it – the Communists.

Men in Maoist China shooting dead a tree sparrow with six guns. Well done lads.

In 1958 Chinese Communist Leader Chairman Mao tried to eradicate tree sparrows to protect grain by creating a populist uprising against this poor little bird.

What the war on ‘pests’ actually did was to  cause large-scale famine among the very people who had undertaken the orders to eradicate tree sparrows – the peasantry. As many as 55 million people died. Little did that Great Leader know the precious grain was feeding one of nature’s great pest-controllers – the tree sparrow.

Thanks for reading.