During one of our orchid hunting forays into the Chateau Joffreny park next door, Greg took the opportunity to photograph some of the frogs in the “River Anglaise”. There were a lot of frogs making a lot of noise and there seemed to be two varieties, and possibly even some hybrids. According to “La Passion […]
Lizards provide a great opportunity for some slightly exotic photography. Find a comfortable seat, a macro-enabled telephoto lens (e.g. 55-250 + extension tube), and sit and wait in front of a sun-drenched wall! You will see plenty of common wall lizards, that are very photogenic. The green lizards are a bit more skittish. The one […]
Cara is doing a lot of macro photography on the insects and plants in and around the house. We are only using kit lenses with our Canon cameras, but we have enhanced the macro function using extension tubes. The tubes we are using are by Viltrox. They are very affordable and seem to be very […]
We have 20 acres of land surrounding our converted Farmhouse. The 10 acre field by the river is loaned to our neighbour’s for grazing. His Limousin Catlle do look lovely, but they are pretty scary when they start chasing you. Ask Cara! As a consequence, all photos of Limousin cattle are taken from the other […]
We like to attract birds to the garden with our bird feeding stations. What we hadn’t anticipated was that the bird-feeding station would become a feeding station for the Sparrowhawk! These are few quick shots taken from the bedroom window of the Sparrowhawk eyeing up the sparrows in the bush below the tit box. he […]
Here are a few photos we took on a sunny day in early March, after weeks of rain. The morning started out frosty but as soon as the sun came out the garden was full of bees busily collecting pollen … in fact, they were so laden with pollen they could hardly fly. As a […]
The Tawny Owls have started to incubate two eggs on the nest above the barn door. The two eggs were laid in Early March 2020 and should take about 28 days to incubate, so we expect to see hatching towards the end of March. The female does all of the incubating, and is periodically fed […]
The floral diversity and associated insect and small mammal populations make our terrain a great location for reptiles. We see plenty of snakes, which are dominated by yellow-collared grass snakes and great western whipsnakes (up to 1.5m). We also commonly see adders, one of which bit our dog a few years back. The first snake […]
We were very surprised to see this fellow turn up on the trail cam one night. He was stood looking over the fence in to the garden. I showed the picture to Christian, the local vet, who is a keen naturalist, who told me he “knew this deer”. I said,”yes, it’s a red deer”. He […]
We have had Little Owls nesting in the bedroom roof-space for several years. In 2019 we decided to install a nest box to try and encourage them to move out. They make so much noise feeding in the middle of the night! Very soon we had a pair investigating the box. They seemed to like […]
