Wildlife and nature photography blogs for May 2010

Have you seen a honey bee recently?  No, I am not surprised, honeybee numbers have been in decline over the last few years and have suffered further decline after the harsh winter. Although numbers are low the rate of decline appears to have slowed. The good news is that they is even a small improvement over previous years.

Think about what the bees do apart form produce honey; pollinating farmer’s crops, apple trees and other fruit trees. Without the bees many crops would go un-pollinated which in turn decreases the amount of food we are able to produce. The country would require much more food to be imported. The food chain that sustains our wild birds and animals would inevitably collapse.

So what can we do?  Why not plant some bee friendly plants in your garden too. Plant bee-friendly flowers, fruits and vegetables in whatever space you have available. Be it a window box, patio pots or a patch in the garden. Everyone can do their bit to help and our bee populations need our assistance. The greater the range of plants you put in, the more bees you will attract. It is best to use native plants; a good garden centre will be able to advise you.

We have planted an area of our own garden with a wildflower mix and hopeful this will attract the bees and other insects and we can look forward to a summer of colourful flowers and the garden resonating with the sounds of our pollinating friends.

This week we are updating the bolg from our hotel room. We are out and about taking some unusual wildlife pictures for us, seabirds. The Yorkshire coast boosts some of the highest sea cliffs in the UK. This provides our seabirds with top of the range accommodation for the nesting season.

Most of the world population of Northern Gannets breed in the UK and the Yorkshire costal cliffs provide the only place you can see these birds from the mainland. All the other Gannet colonies require a sea voyage.



As well as the Gannets you can also see many other species of seabirds. One of the most prolific are the Kittiwakes.



Until next time.

We have all heard about the oil spill off the coast of Mexico; an environmental disaster in the making. But what will the consequences and impact be on the natural world and people of the area. Some of the effected region faced hurricane Katrina, which devastated so many people’s lives. Many are only just getting back on their feet. How are these events going to affect them?

It is not only the local impact the oil spill has, but ultimately a global one. Fish stocks, birds, animals the marine environment will all be impacted on as more and more oil escapes. I don’t believe that they can stop all of the oil reaching vulnerable wildlife, even if they do manage to contain the leak. Areas of coastline are already being contaminated as oil is washed ashore - who knows how much.

Looking at the long term, food chains could be greatly affected. It starts small, infected fish are eaten, and the next in the food chain eats these fish, and so on. These creatures then migrate to different parts of the world and the infection is transferred to another area. Who knows how long these chains are.

The oil spill presents problems for people too. Many earn their living from fishing or tourism. Both of which will decline due to the spill, bringing with them far reaching consequences for many years to come. Just look at the Exxon Valdez oil spill and how long Prince William Sound in Alaska has taken to recover.

Events that happening thousands of miles away make you think about our own fragile environment and the challenges we face here in the UK. A recent UN report, which uses research from 120 nations shows that no country in the world has successfully halted the loss of biodiversity; however there has been some success in protecting sensitive areas of land and sea. Read the article in The Times, www.timesonline.co.uk, environment section - Third of all plants and animals face extinction.

After a long wait we finally got a reply from Extensis regarding the problems we have been having with Portfolio 8.5.4. You can read the full article, but for those without the time here is a quick recap.

When the clocks changed here in the UK to BST (British Summer Time) which is 1 hour ahead of UTC (Universal Corrected Time) many of the files in our Extensis Portfolio database reported that there had been changes. To correct this Portfolio needed to update its database, thumbnails and display jpg files, to re synchronise database with the Tiff files. If you only had a few images in your database maybe this would not be a problem. When the total runs into many, many thousands this process can take days if not weeks.

This scenario was bad enough but when we tried to update the files nothing changed. We were left with a database that reported that over half the images needed to be updated. Our only solution, which we invented was to turn back the clocks on the PC’s to UTC when using Portfolio.

We exchanged emails with Extensis support and eventually we got this reply from them.

Unfortunately we unable to offer an alternative workaround or fix at present.

There'll will be one more update for Portfolio 8.5 coming shortly but it would not be possible to include new features requests or fixes in time to be included in the next version.

Email from Extensis Support

The update of Portfolio to 8.5.5 has just been released and we have tried the new version release. It would appear from initial test that the problem is still with us.

What do we do now?  Well I guess the answer is to find something better than Extensis Portfolio 8.5. Why should we give Extensis any more of our money?

Until next time

The weather can make fools of us all. We recently wrote about what we can expect to out and about during May and made reference to the saying "April showers bring forth May flowers". Well guess what, this April has been one of the warmest and driest on record. So I shall have to eat my words.

Looking at our weekly temperatures, there is still a big variation. Lowest recorded temperature was 0.4 and highest 24.8 degrees. Although, some parts of the country are still waiting for spring to happen. Watching a recent weather forecast; a comment made was, to watch out for night frosts.

Mean maximum temperature                  21.6°c
Mean minimum temperature                    2.0°c
(five week month)