Posts tagged Nature

Skomer Visit – Crazy Puffins and other island inhabitants

1 year ago

in My Blog

It’s taken us 2 years to get to Skomer! We booked time off work to go last month but the weather was too bad in the end; didn’t want to travel 5 hours for nothing.
We travelled down last Friday afternoon and stayed in a camp-site just 5mins away from the boat – all very last min plans.
After a nightmare night in a tent I was up at 7:30 getting ready to queue for the boat.
Queued for 45 mins only to be told the boat wasn’t going due to expected high winds later in the day. I was gutted! I asked about weather for Sunday and was told the forecast was the same We tried again on Sunday morning anyway and at 8:30 we were greeted with good news – the weather was fine and boats would be going. We managed to get over on the first boat of the day.

What we managed to see on the island in 4 hours:

GUILLEMOT
CURLEW
Many types of gull
RAZORBILL
PHEASANT
GANNET
COMMON BUZZARD
OYSTERCATCHER
ATLANTIC PUFFINS
1 x LITTLE OWL
1x WREN
Few CHOUGH
4 x GREY SEALS
2 x PORPOISES
Unidentified brown lizard

I managed to grab a photo of the Oystercatcher Family

Its a amazing how close you can get to the Puffins, I managed to get about 2ft from a puffin nest to get some excellent close up photos. You have to respect the Puffins space though and allow he/she pass by to go fishing for sand eels. I captured a short video so you can hear the funny noise puffins make.

Little Owl

After watching the Puffins for some time we ventured in land to try and see if we could get a glimpse of the owls on Skomer.
We only had to walk 5mins and I noticed this little owl on the wall.

Skomer Island is a wonderful place, we will definitely be going back again. What a lovely day, weather was amazing.

All Photos by Matt Debouge and Kirsty Forshaw

Nature photos from India

3 years ago

in My Blog

Processing images from my India trip is going very slow, I put it down to the busy Christmas build-up and Modern Warfare 2, well mainly Modern Warfare 2.

Online multiplayer is very addictive, at the moment I’m playing it twice a day, I have to say it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. I’ve been playing computer games since the days of Pong Tennis back in the 80′s. WOW have we come along way since then. I can now chat to my mates from around the UK on xbox live while running around a war zone like a crazed maniac with a M16 and commando knife, sometimes staying alive long enough to kill 10 plus enemies, then brought down by a 10 year old from the US, probably.

Well, back to the photos, today I’m uploading some nature photos taken from my trip to south India. Taken with Nikon D90 and a Nikon D70, with a mixture of lenses from my 18-70 to 70-300 mainly. Processed in Lightroom 2 and sharpened in Photoshop.

We did a jungle trek in Periyar, I managed to grab this photo of a tree snake. The jungle trek was amazing and hard work
We both walked about 10km that day, with wet shoes covered in leeches trying to get in our socks. Great experience, we saw some good wildlife that day.