The Osprey's View Blog
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Wildlife
I'd had the idea for a couple of weeks. With the spring sun slowly showing itself more regularly and getting warmer, I wanted to go looking for snakes to photograph which would hopefully be emerging from their winter hibernation by now. I had one unsuccessful attempt already up on nearby Ditchling Beacon in the Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve last week with not even a sign, even though I remember seeing an adder there many years ago.
I've been out birding and wildlife watching with the camera quite a bit this winter. I have seen a lot of goldcrests but a recent comment made me think about watching out for the rarer firecrest so I have been checking each bird for the telltale eyestripes. Lo and behold today I came across my target (above) while out at the Sussex Wildlife Trust's Woods Mill reserve near Henfield.
Each winter a wildlife spectacle unfolds in my local Sussex countryside that remains largely unknown and unseen. The sea trout, the ocean going form of our native brown trout (and exactly the same Salmo trutta species), returns to freshwater rivers just as salmon do, to pair up and lay their eggs in gravel stretches high up in the feeder streams where the water runs cleaner and faster and holds more oxygen.
Getting up well before dawn, especially while travelling, can seem like a strange thing to do at the best of times but the reward often more than justifies the effort and so it was on this glorious day near Phatthalung in southern Thailand. A figurative and literal sea of pink stretched out to the horizon before us in the warm golden light of a tropical sunrise and for the time being we had this glorious natural spectacle all to ourselves.
The fallow deer rut at Petworth Park in West Sussex is one of those annual events that anyone can see thanks to the public access to the park and the deer being used to visitors.
Bee orchid from the South Downs National Park in Sussex.
Summer time in Sussex and the wildflowers are blooming up on my local South Downs near Jack & Jill windmills. This colourful Bee orchid is one of my favourites.
