This is a fairly stock Hebden Bridge shot, but get used to it — I have a (for me) relatively long period at home coming up. I like this shot because of the varied, yet limited palette. It’s nice because it’s both varied and limited.
I’m sure there are lots of things that could be better about this picture, but hey, it ain’t easy to capture wild red deer in England — there really aren’t very many of them, and they really don’t like people. This was my best attempt. I like the way the two bucks are clearly keeping an eye out for anyone who might be messin’ with their does, so to speak.
For all that it represents the time of the year’s decline into old age there is something fine about autumn. It permits us to see the ways the cycle of life keeps itself turning. Fungi come into their own, consuming what they can before the cold freezes things up entirely.
Always a pleasing event of the year. Not many blackberries around yet, but they will come. Plums… for us will, I hope, be just as much in glut as they were two years ago. Believe me, if you live in Hebden Bridge and want cheap plums, give us a couple of weeks, we will be overflowing.
Committing — as I have for four years now, of course — to presenting a photo every day is fine when I’m out and about but not always easy to fulfill when I just hang around the house, and today was made even trickier by spending the second half of it in bed, feeling ill. (No, it’s not related to drinking too much on my birthday yesterday.) The evening sun caught our pet chilli well; and that was about the only photo opportunity I got today, I’m afraid.
I’m sure that somewhere in the textual ether there’s a better title for this shot but it wouldn’t come to me. I see the slug as a kind of advance scouting party, keeping itself inconspicuous while it checks out the rich pickings ahead. As it wasn’t my garden, I left it to it’s task…
I have this image of the bee just diving in and troughing, like it’s the bee equivalent of some Roman orgy or similar. “Hah! Gimme nectar!”
Last full day in Tanzania, with the very long (35 hour) journey home starting just after lunch. Breakfast was provided for more than just the human guests of the Springlands Hotel in Moshi.
Did not see a huge amount of fauna on Kili, though with so many people around this is probably attributable to animals’ shyness rather than depopulation as such. There were flocks of big white-necked ravens, with impressive beaks, however, and also quite a few of these sparrow-like birds. This one was pictured in the Karanga valley, which we dropped into just before the end of walking on day 4, here at about 3,700m (12,140 feet).
There are various routes one can take up Kilimanjaro. Ours was known as the Machame route, named for its starting point, one of the gates to the Kilimanjaro National Park. This point stood at 1,800m (just over 5,900 feet), so was already higher than I had ever actually walked before. As you can see, it was popular with these critters, blue monkeys, this one using this information board as a vantage point to scope out the potential for stealing the food of the other critters, the hundreds of walkers, porters and guides getting ready to start on the climb (one thing about Kili — you don’t do it for the solitude).
Being 42 