A chance to see a rare vagrant gull on my doorstep was too good to miss and so last week I took a visit to the Ogmore estuary in South Wales and was not to be disappointed.
Category: Articles
Big Garden Birdwatch RSPB Ads and Cats!
The recent publicity around the forthcoming garden birdwatch has caught my attention – whilst having a pee!! On the way to Bristol we stopped in the motorway services and the add above was staring me in the face. It was placed above all the urinals in the loos!
Why Bird Photographers Must Stand Their Ground
Last year I invested in a Nikon D3s and have been putting it through its paces. It’s a camera that challenges everything I was taught in traditional analogue photography.
An Uncomfortable Space
The relationship between the cliff top and the sea has always fascinated me. The space that divides the two is somewhere we rarely venture. I’m not a rock climber and even then you’re still grounded, all be it to a near vertical incline.
Heading South – The Final Chapter
A day late we headed south and the weather didn’t let us down – it rained! By now we were wanting it to, better to be able to say we had seventeen days with rain, heavy at that, on every single one of them.
Handa at Last!
We woke to rain, nothing unusual about that, but the van wasn’t shaking and it just felt stiller. Looking out to Handa was just too much, we had planned to move back south today but being opposite the island and now with the possibility that today the boat just might run, we had to give it one last shot. We could move down south a little quicker it was a chance we had to take. It had even stopped raining!
A Few Encounters – 3
An early morning start at Llyn On gave a very atmospheric sighting of a Great-northern Diver. The photograph at the beginning of this post shows the breath coming directly after it called, a very erie sound with low mist hanging on the water.
Scourie -1
We knew that Handa was a ‘no goer’ today but we still went down to Tarbet where the boat leaves from in more hope than anticipation. Met the boatman coming back in his van, “not a chance today, tomorrow not looking good either”
Further North to Scourie
Leaving Ullapool we travelled up to Scourie and another impressive site, one I’d not stayed on before. You couldn’t really get much closer to the sea here and overlooking Handa, which was to be our last hope of visiting a single off shore island on this journey to Scotland.
Ardmair – 4
A Few Encounters – 2
Ardmair – 3
After lunching at Reiff we headed south to Achitibuie to look back towards Ardmair and past by the best school bus stop I’ve ever seen. Just imagine standing there waiting for the day to begin!
Ardmair – 2
The ‘mad little road’ was empty and very wet but as we moved out towards Achiltibuie things began to clear and the wind began to get up.
Ardmair – 1
Ardmair was to be our base for the next couple of nights. The last paragraph of my diary entry for our first day sums up what was to be another long but ultimately rewarding day,
…so all in all saw a great sunrise, a magnificent sunset and 16 hours in between which gave very occasional glimpses of the sublime.
Cwm Nash: At the Edge of Light
Much of my work over the years has been coastal, it’s somewhere were so much is going on; so many processes and changes, it’s continual and in constant flux and has the capacity to take you into a different space and time.
Caerfai
The hour and a half Brendan and I spent on the beach with the tide pushing us back towards the cliffs took me back to my work at Druidston in Pembrokeshire (more posts to follow).
Glimpse, by Brendan Stuart Burns
I’ve always been an avid collector of books and despite now owning a Kindle (they do have some advantages), I’ll keep collecting. You commune with books, they become part of you and immersion within them is an experience that is at times intensely personal.
Calendar Walk – 1
A New Calendar – Flowers of Argoed
Firemore to Ardmair
We’d had one of those extreme moments within the landscape, when something transcendental occurs.