Beauty in the Commonplace

Tonight saw the last of four Springwatch themed specials, as my fellow wildlife nuts in the UK will know. I am sorry for my overseas reader, that you cant or did not see them. However, the key message in all of them was simply that wildlife is brilliant and its all around us.

While I recognise that I am lucky living where I do. I get to see all sorts of wildlife in my local environment. But, the thing is there will be people in other parts of Britain that will get to see other natural history in there locations. This applies equally to my overseas readers. In a recent comment by a human Ent that reads my web log, she offered, amongst other things A raccoon, a skunk a couple of foxes and a half eaten chipmunk (I can see my postwomans face at trying to deliver that), and while I would love to see all (except the chipmunk), I realise that I can not. Not in my local area anyway.

However, I would encourage everyone to enjoy and appreciate the wildlife you have. Be it the trees that are in your town, or those wild flowers in the garden, or even the sparrows that cant sing, there is beauty in all around us.

To illustrate this here is a link to two little films that I shot just in my back yard. One is of Sparrows on and flying around the seed feeder. The other is of Jackdaws feeding from the same feeder and showing how acrobatic they can be. Both I have used slow motion to show the beauty and grace of the birds.

While on the subject of filming, I had hoped that from filming the Red Kites yesterday, I would have some great footage, but as I have discovered cheap tapes don't last. The quality is so poor that I can not transfer it to the computer. With some of the previous footage that I have been shooting I was having difficulties and it looks as though I have lost some of that. While disappointing, it has taught me how I need to work so that I don't loose anything in the future.

Well there is no point crying over spilt milk, it just means that I will have to go out and do better.