Very little opportunity to take photos of anything today, due to spending almost all of it sat at home working. Just as well this rather butch-looking bird was perched on the old bridge in town when I went to pick up Joe from school, therefore.
I guess dogs can have a long day, and feel tired at the end of it, just as we can. It was a decent, sunny day today, it’s been a good weekend for me in various ways, but though I don’t share this animal’s feelings, I do sympathise.
Taken just past the halfway point of a walk undertaken from my parents’ house this afternoon. The leaves are well and truly turning here and I did get a couple of good photos of autumn colours but this one I like because it seems less a picture of foliage, and more a picture of a moment, a burst of light captured by the water and trapped there.
Been a good weekend for celebrating nature’s bounty. After the rare wildlife of yesterday, more commonplace flora today. Yet, with a decent blackberry harvest from the garden and verges as well, there was tonight’s pudding, further proof that the best things in life are free.
I went on a walk today – the fifth-to-last one in my project to walk all the 214 ‘Wainwright’ fells in the English Lake District – and you can read about that on my other blog, and see many photos that are a lot better quality than this shoddy, out-of-focus shot. (Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have them up later today.) So why is this crappy picture the ‘Photo of the Day’, then?
Because this is a golden eagle goddammit. There are two – two – golden eagles in the whole of England. Scotland has quite a few – at least, if farmers and landowners can be exhorted to stop poisoning them (a disgusting example of environmental carnage, which the RSPB have long been campaigning against) – but England has just one breeding pair, who reside in Riggindale. This is a valley at the southern end of the reservoir of Haweswater, in the east of the district.
I was within a mile of that valley today, above the deep and remote coombe of Threshthwaite Cove, near the summit of Caudale Moor (fell #205). I saw this large bird fly through the cove and swoop up onto a promontory. I didn’t think, at first, what it might be, but I’d seen where it landed and saw that the rocky promontory was being touched very well by the sunlight, so I stopped for a few minutes to see if I could capture it. The more I took of it the more I thought, hang on, this is far too big to be a hawk or even a falcon. This picture above was my best effort, as it really was quite a way away and even at maximum (70x) zoom this is as good as it got. But I got enough other pictures, including of its face, to be very sure that what I saw and photographed here is, indeed, quite literally, the rarest bird in England.
I once knew someone who was completely inept at golf, a total novice, but who once flukily hit a hole-in-one, witnessed by many people. Seve Ballesteros went his whole career without hitting one. I feel like I may have done the birdwatching equivalent here. Sorry to anyone who has been twitching for decades and never got one like this, then. But now, at least, you know roughly where to find it.
Since Sunday I have spent the great majority of my time sat on my butt, working. It needs doing, but it doesn’t make for many photography opportunities. What you’ve been seeing here are just snatches of time, unrepresentative of life, really.
Today I was working at home all day and yet, still, there are these little bits and pieces of things to see, moments where the familiar territory of my house of 11 years shows me something new or different. This strand of honeysuckle reached down from the front wall and into the well below the kitchen window by our shed (where the cave spider lives), giving some colour to a grey and autumnal morning.
When I was in the Lousiana swamp a few weeks back I saw alligators – we definitely don’t have them in Yorkshire. Cypresses and wolf spiders, spotted on the tour, are also not usually seen round here. But when the guide pointed out a sleek, tall drink of water of a bird with a beak like a dagger, a fish’s worst nightmare – oh yeah, we have them in Yorkshire. Really? Yes, really. Herons often fish in the river that runs through the centre of town. And here is one, just to prove it. Handsome beast, isn’t it?
No added comments today except RIP Joan Hall, 28th April 1924 – 13th August 2012. My maternal grandmother – her funeral was today.
The wildly optimistic part of me still thinks that come September maybe we will get a run of nice warm and sunny days, but even if September in the UK can often be fine that is probably clutching at straws. The day was a largely pleasant one but there was just something autumnal about the morning, a crispness in the air that foretells the cold to come.
So, it’s my birthday. I’m 43. The name of this blog is now out of date but I might as well keep it. I could have tried to post a picture that represented the celebrations somehow but I didn’t do anything particularly different – although the afternoon was a fun one and spent with friends. While sitting at the Shoulder of Mutton pub in the centre of Hebden Bridge there was this parade of husky dogs, there must have been some kind of meeting of an owners’ club as they were everywhere. And why not show them off, because they were truly beautiful creatures, and obliging models too. So we’ll start the second year with a picture of one of them.
Being 42 