Goodnight Winter


Goodnight frosty mornings and severe weather warnings. Goodnight mud and flash floods. Goodnight snow and turbulent flows. Goodnight rain; come again soon. Goodnight ice and goodnight cold air. Goodnight, winter everywhere.

Kingston Ridge

Beech tree, Stanmer Down

Riding, Stanmer Down

Birling Gap and Seven Sisters

Starlings

Roe deer

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Brighton Starling Murmurations - 2020 / 2021

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Welcome to my starling murmuration essay for 2020/21. I had planned to photograph something else this winter, but I changed my mind on a whim, after going to Brighton Pier a few days after the second lockdown ended. By the forth visit, I had enough creative images to stop and publish the essay  — and the twenty images here are from a total of six trips to the pier . Some of my images are highly unusual, and left me wondering how I even managed to take them. Take the first picture  —  a night city motion blur shot of birds and light trails from evening traffic. Shots three and four give us an idea of what a starling murmuration would look like, if photographed from within the atmosphere of Jupiter. The monochromatic motion blur images (ten to eighteen) look like they've been sketched on art paper using a pencil. I captured the strangeness of the murmuration, as it compacted into an oval before unravelling like a rope in pouring rain well after sunset, as most other photographers she
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Early Summer Roe Deer Project 2019

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Don't miss my roe deer projects from 2020  and  2021 . 23rd May 2019: I was so pleased with the images from my first visit, that I could easily have finished the project in one evening. Temperatures were a good seven degrees warmer inland, reaching 23 °C and the Roe deer were just shedding the last of their thick winter coats. Grass height was still short enough to allow the easy observation of these small deer. The three babies from last year survived the winter; two bucks and one doe. The young buck was quite tolerant of me. When people wandered through the field, the buck went and hovered about the perimeter until they disappeared before returning to grazing on buttercups. Two adult does were present, but neither were pregnant. An adult buck accompanied one of the does. Possibly mistaking her availability, the buck chased the doe around the field in an unusually early display of courtship. My theory is that the doe is infertile, as she was not pregnant in 2018 either.  To a
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Brighton Starling Murmurations - Winter 2019 / 2020

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Update:  When you've finished this gallery, move onto my project for 2020/21 . Welcome to my winter starling murmuration project. The photo essay is a dying art, so please encourage me to produce more like this, by leaving a comment at the bottom. You don't even have to login. Your name or an alias is better than posting as Anonymous. Starling murmurations are one of the most mesmerising sights in the natural world. Every winter, starlings escaping sub-zero temperatures in Scandinavia migrate to more temperate European latitudes. The south coast of England is mild throughout the winter, although the weather can be very wet and windy at times. The birds spend daylight hours in parks, gardens and farmland. Every afternoon, they gather in their thousands to form shape-shifting, fluid murmurations, before roosting for the night, underneath Brighton Pier.  Anyone in the city centre at around 07:30 in December will be startled by huge flocks of starlings making their way back to
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