Water Vole Education

With the skies a leaden blanket of grey outside and the rain beating against the window, its nice to turn the clock back a couple of months to think about the long warm days of summer. After putting in a bit of effort in photographing water voles in the spring, I decided to return to them once more in the mid to late summer period. My water voles photography is a long-term project (possibly lifelong!) but I felt that I really had not spent enough time with them to learn about their behaviour and habitats.

Why bother? Well for two main reasons firstly out of personal interest and secondly once you can start to get an insight into how an animal behaves then the photography often becomes easier. The other purpose for this concerted effort was also to look at experimenting with techniques to get around the significant constraints on photography at this particular canal site. Overall these sessions proved to be very useful and I have now formulated a clear approach for photographing the water voles at this site next year. Importantly I have also learnt a great deal about the voles which will hopefully be readily transferable to other sites.

Timing is all in wildlife photography, afterall it is impossible to photograph what isn't there. Many animals have regular daily routines and it is only be frequent observation that you can start establishing patterns. Once your have worked out where and when they are likely appear, which can take some time, then you can actually start pursuing an approach of short targeted but productive photography sessions. This has a real benefit if you only have limited camera time to fit into an otherwise busy life. People often say to me  that I must have a lot of patience to photograph wildlife but with this targeted approach minimises the waiting around and staring at fresh air.

Water voles have cycles of routine - eat, clean, sleep, eat, clean, have a dispute with the neighbour, sleep and so on. Often several will become active feeding at the same time and then it will go quiet again as they go back to sleep. If you arrived in a sleep period you could easily be forgiven that there are no voles there at all except for the typical vole signs they leave in their wake. After a few first light visits it quickly became obvious that one particular activity period occurred between around 8:30 - 10:00 am. A very early start would just see me sat for several hours with no activity and  quickly ruled out the need to set the alarm clock to a very unsociable hour. I ended up spending a good deal of time photographing one particular vole which I could almost predict. It would appear in a particular spot on the far side of the canal and feed for a while, drop into the water with that characteristic 'plop', swim to a patch of common reed to feed there for a while, drop back in the canal swim back to original spot to feed some more before disappearing (presumably for a sleep).

Sitting by the side of a canal in camouflage clothing (although this is actually probably unnecessary as water vole eyesight is not great) with a long lens pointing towards apparently nothing on the far bank inevitably draws attention and enquiry from every passing boat, jogger, cyclist and dogwalker. Typically the response is 'oh water voles' and inevitably their eyes avert to where the camera is pointing in the hope of a glimpse of this rapidly declining mammal. I remember one particular jogger who stopped and asked. I indicated that there was one currently in the patch of reeds and if she looked at a particular stem she would see it disappearing which is was rapidly in short 15cm movements as the vole pulled it downwards. The jogger stood transfixed by the rapidly disappearing vegetation.

I very rarely record video, and this is a blog first, but thought you may be interested in this short clip of a Water vole feeding, not very sensibly on stinging nettles as you will see towards the end.

Water Vole feeding from Richard Steel on Vimeo.

The water vole photography season is now over but I am already looking forward to putting what I have learnt and trialing of different techniques in to action. So here wishing the colony a safe and mink-free winter.

The Green Woodpecker Challenge

Despite slowly extending their range northward within the UK, the Green Woodpecker remains a fairly scarce bird where I live in North-West of England.  There is one reasonably local site that this striking bird can be seen reasonably regularly which is an old graveyard where I have only ever seen the male and young birds present.  However, seeing a green woodpecker and photographing one is completely different challenge as they are extremely wary and unapproachable birds and can prove incredibly frustrating at times. Of course bird photography often requires you to get close to a bird, even with a long lens, which comes as a surprise to those not involved in wildlife photography. The common belief when someone sees a photographer with a long lens is that you are able to photograph your subject from several kilometers away but the reality is the bird actually needs to be within a few metres of you. The Green Woodpecker photography challenge is also compounded by the fact that I am trying to find a single green bird that spends most of its time in the grass and has hundreds of gravestones to hide behind in a 30 hectare area.

When I returned from Romania this year I was determined to have a concentrated effort trying to photograph this tricky but very beautiful bird. During the mid-summer period these woodpeckers become preoccupied with gathering their main prey of ants for their rapidly growing young, holed up in a tree somewhere unknown, and become slightly more approachable. I decided I would target the evenings, as it would allow an after work session and the graveyard would be generally quieter. The first task was to try and establish the movements of the solitary male bird.

The male below showing a bulging crop having excavated several ant nests in the course of the evening, with some still stuck on its beak.

I have learnt that Green Woodpeckers often show regular patterns of behaviour and will routinely visit certain areas at particular times of day which is no doubt is tied into the activity of ant nests. It took a couple of visits, and listening hard for that distinctive 'yaffle' call to locate the male before I worked out that he could generally be found in an area about the size of two football pitches between 6:00pm and 8:30pm. I then visited 2 to 3 evenings a week over about a month period. Slowly I started to capture some images and the more time I spent with the bird the more I learnt about how best to approach it. Soon I was starting to get full frame images. The important point was once located you could not let the bird out of your sight for a moment. If it made a short flight I used the graves as a reference point to where it had landed. On occasions it would seem to just vanish into thin air! Frequently it would hop behind a gravestone and I would wait for some time for it to reappear on the other side and it never would. I would re-position myself to try and see the bird and it would be gone, having hopped directly away from me with the tombstone shielding its 'escape'. The process of trying to relocate it would then have to start all over again and often proved unsuccessful. Another important lesson was the benefit trying to predict the route the bird would move along on the ground and to get in position and wait for it to hop towards me. This worked some of the time!

Inevitably with the site being a graveyard I ended up with the occasional photograph of the woodpecker perched on top of a gravestone, as it rested in between excavating ant nests.

Interestingly, I found the bird was very sensitive to the camera shutter noise, so I resorted to using my Canon 1DmkIV rather than the 1DX which is a great deal quieter in so called 'silent mode'.

Capturing the a Green Woodpecker perched on a tree is extremely difficult as it will inevitably move around to the far side away from you, occasionally peeking around the trunk to keep an eye on your position. On one occasion I was fortunate as a person passing forced it to move around the tree and into the line of my waiting camera. A photograph I have longed to take.

After about three weeks of evening sessions, a new woodpecker call could be heard, as a solitary young bird appeared.  It had obviously not been a very successful breeding year. The young birds appear to fledge with the same very wary  temperament as the adults.

From previous experience the young birds tend to follow the male who keeps feeding them while they quickly learn the business of finding ants and seem to become independent very quickly.

This usually only last a week or two and then all the woodpeckers disappear as the young disperse out of the adults territory and the adult goes into a late summer moult.

The photographs above are a selection from the Green Woodpecker challenge which actually went much better than I expected.  I will post more photos from these summer evening sessions in a future blog post. Some very memorable warm summer evenings were spent in the company of this charismatic species and I hope it is something I can repeat in future years having gained a better insight into how to get them in front of the camera.

Face Value

Sorry for the lack of recent blog updates, I have just changed to a new computer which always takes longer than you think to setup. In this age of computers information moves at such a fast pace and we have grown accustomed to everything happening quickly. Instant news, conversation and responses have become part of our busy time-stretched lives. We have also come to accept being bombarded with a constant stream of wonderful images, that are continually uploaded to the internet through websites and social media, thanks to the advances in digital cameras. However, have we become too blase about photographs and only consider the aesthetics and content and forgotten about the efforts and skill that goes into making the image.

As a wildlife photographer I am strong believer that you do it because you firstly love being close to wild animals and  photography offers a means of recording those encounters to share the wonders of the natural world with others. As with many aspects of life the more effort you dedicate to a pursuit, the greater the rewards and personal satisfaction.

In recent years, with the increase in the number of people with good camera equipment, there has naturally been a corresponding growing trend in the rise of the commercial hide. From these it is now relatively easy to get some amazing images of a wide variety of species, although the photos will look very similar to the numerous photographers that have visited previously. You turn up, pay your money and with a moderate amount of photography skill and some reasonable kit can walk away with memory cards full of excellent images.  Please do not get me wrong I have nothing against this and for some difficult species such as birds of prey, like golden eagle, goshawk or osprey, it is the only way you are likely to ever get any photographs. I also have no complaint against people who use the hides but must wonder if the majority of their photography consists of travelling around the various network of these hides it cannot be very rewarding in the long run.  However, what I do find annoying is the increasing number of photographers who are using these hides to become  'trophy hunters' and to whom the capture of an amazing image with which to impress their social media followers seems to have become more important than the wildlife.

Of course all the hard work has been done for the photographer by the owner of the hide to make sure the best images can be achieved in terms of light and settings. The 'trophy hunters' seem to be using the hides as a short-cut to self promotion in wildlife photography circles. Unfortunately all too rarely do I see the owner of the hide credited for their hard work, as it is only due to all their efforts that the creation of great images is possible and relatively easy. I find it more disturbing that some of the photographers go a step further and do not even mention the use of the commercial hide to get viewers of the photographs to believe it was obtained through their amazing field craft skills. Unfortunately some go a step beyond this and make up some unlikely yarn that they crawled through hectares of brambles or sat out in horrendous conditions for weeks on end to capture that precious and elusive image. We all need to slow down a bit when viewing images and put a bit more thought into not looking just at the face value of the image but give some due consideration and question on how it might have been achieved.

A few weeks back I visited one such commercial hide that is operated in West Yorkshire for Kingfisher photography. So before I show any photographs I would like to say a very big thank you to Mark for all his hard work in setting this up and without which none of the following images would be possible. I just turned up and pressed the shutter button.  I have photographed kingfisher before, albeit many years ago, but thought I was long overdue to spend some time with one. A day spent in close proximity to such a beautiful and interesting bird can be very enriching and lift the spirits. For me the photographs from this session are really for myself as a memory of the encounter but for those who have not had the opportunity to be up close to one of these birds I am more than happy to share them here. So I will say no more now and just post a few of the images, happy in the knowledge that you know how they were achieved.

Brown and Red

As usual through this year I have spent some time photographing Brown Hares. There are two main reasons for this, one being that they are always great fun to photograph and secondly the hare site is close to home which allows me to pop in to undertake short evening sessions. The photographs in this post have mostly been taken in the evening when the light has been low, as you can tell by the size of the hares' pupils in some of the images,  and on these occasions the superb high ISO performance and autofocus capabilities of the Canon 1DX has really paid dividends.

A hare in full flight. These animals can hit about 40 mph at full speed. This one is being chased by another which is just out of frame.

For the next photograph a rather unusual setting for some hares in woodland by the edge of the field. You often see hares in pairs with a male guarding the female, having won her affections, from the attentions of other males.

A hare sat amongst some dandelion and bluebells, catching the last rays, just as the sun is about to disappear below the horizon.

During one stage in the late spring there were large numbers of dandelion around that had gone to seed. The hares spend a good deal of time targeting them as part of their diet and always eat their way down the stem from the bottom.

Another hare in flight. The speed that they can turn at full speed is  amazing and makes for some tricky tracking with the camera sometimes.

Of course some of the best moments are when you occasionally get a hare running straight towards you and it just keeps getting larger and larger in the camera view until you can no longer fit it in frame.

My favourite time with hares though is when you are lying down next to them at very close range. From this perspective with some careful position and an open lens the grass can be rendered in a green mist by the shallow depth of field.

Of course the other advantage of the evening sessions is that occasionally you are rewarded with a bonus and some luck. As I was driving down the road something caught the corner of my eye and it took a few moments to register what I had seen. I reversed back up and there,  sat relaxed  in the open, was one of the most beautiful vixen I have seen in some soft evening light. She just sat there staring straight at me through those soft amber eyes, before deciding it was too much effort on a summer's evening and lay down to take in the last of the day's warmth and light. Just a magical encounter.

Spring Water Vole Patrol

It is with some relief that I have finally got my Romania blog posts finished off. It took much longer than anticipated as there were many photographs to go through. So now I can get back to what I have been doing in the UK this year and have lots of interesting images to bring you that include water voles, hares, green woodpeckers, ospreys and kingfisher. The water voles and green woodpeckers I have put quite a bit of effort into this year and enjoyed every moment of it. So I will start the ball rolling with some spring Water voles.

Regular readers will know that I started photographing water voles last year, thanks to being show some locations by Kate the very knowledgeable vole expert. Many thank once again for showing me the world of water voles to which I have become a lifelong fan :). Unfortunately I did not have time to put much effort into this last year, and so thought I would try a bit harder in this one at the same canal site. It is not the easiest site for photography due to various constraints but I always like a challenge.  My plan on this long-term project was to spend my time this year thinking about techniques and approaches to improve the images and importantly learning more about the voles. I am hoping to put all I have learnt this year, which has been a great deal,  into a final concerted effort next year to hopefully realise the virtual photographs in my head.

My first visit was back in April, which was mainly a reconnaissance visit to check the voles were still present. My main concern was that an American mink may have found the colony and wiped it out. As I pulled into the parking area all my fears subsided as there sat on the far bank on the canal, in the early sun, was a water vole nibbling away on some grass. A promising start but those photographs were the only one from that visit, although I did spot a couple more voles and there were several typical signs of activity.

 As you can see in the photograph below. The water vole is on top of some fabric which has been used to repair the bank in this section of the canal and one of the reasons why the vole thrive here as they are able to gnaw through the fabric to make their burrows. Obviously this is something they are not able to do on the more usual concrete canal banks! Other key reasons why they are present is an undisturbed far bank of the canal, the lack of mink and also importantly the maintenance of a buffer strip of vegetation between the canal and adjoining agricultural fields. It shows that a few simple vole-friendly measures can greatly assist in providing suitable habitat for this rapidly declining mammal. Depressingly national survey results released last week showed there had been another estimated 20% drop in the water vole population, although I think part of this result may be due to marked reduction in surveying effort.

Given that the spring had been so delayed by the cold conditions I did not visit the site again until early May, when I figured there would be more activity, and undertook a further two morning sessions during this month before having to head off to Romania. These sessions proved productive and I managed to capture a good number of water vole images but was also starting to get a better handle on their behaviour and routines. I must admit I have become addicted to water vole photography which I find very relaxing, although does require some patience, and it is always a real pleasure to watch the antics of these very endearing animals.

A selection of images from these Spring sessions are shown below.

Just about to drop into the canal with that characteristic 'plop' which I am constantly listening out for.

There are very few places for the water voles to sit at water level in the canal. This one is a perched on an old rusty bolt.

Appearing through a hole in the fabric.

Swimming along like a mini beaver

and taking some dry grass back to burrow

I have witnessed the water voles eating some unusual vegetation, in this case some ivy which I always thought was fairly inedible.

It is now time to introduce you to one particular vole which I have been watching in particular and learning its routine and with which I spent a good deal of time during the late summer observing and photographing. So expect to see some more photographs of it in a future water vole blog post.