British Seabird Islands: Bass Rock

Well it has been a short while since I last blogged. It is not a great excuse but I have been working on my dissertation project - a photo book for the Scottish project and university dissertation - and am just a little sick of writing.

Anyway, I thought I would do a three articles comparing of the seabird islands I have visited this year: Skomer, Inner Farne, and Bass Rock. There are of course other seabird islands in the British Isles, but I have not had the pleasure of visiting them.

Firstly, Bass Rock. Bass Rock is a 300 million year old volcanic plug in the middle of the Firth of Forth. As every geography student knows, volcanic plugs are produced when the lava tubes of extinct volcanoes solidify and the surrounding rock is eroded away. The textbook example of this is Castle Rock in Edinburgh, and Bass Rock was produced by a related volcanic eruption.

From afar, the surface of Bass Rock appears white. This is a combination of a coating of guano and a smothering of Gannets. Over 150,000 Gannets crowd onto Bass Rock, making it the largest rock Gannetry in the world. Gannets and Bass Rock are so inextricably linked that Linnaeus, the grand old father of Taxonomy, gave Gannets the latin name Morus bassanus in reference to the rock.

A trip to Bass Rock starts in the town of Dunbar: the only town in the UK where Kittiwakes outnumber humans. This may not be true as I have no idea how many inhabitants live in Dunbar, what its Kittiwake population is, or the Kittiwake to human ratio of any other British towns. Still, it is a good guess. Regardless you can get within feet of Kittiwakes and their chicks without causing any disturbance.

The boat ride takes around 45 minutes to an hour and can get very choppy. Take waterproofs and, no matter how calm the sea looks, put them on: a lesson I learned the hard way. On either the boat trip to the island or the boat trip back, the captain will throw bucketfuls of dead fish over the side: a process known as chumming. This attracts hungry seabirds from miles around.

Fortunately for the Gannets - but unfortunately for photographers - Bass Rock's Gannets have been getting plenty of food this year so are less inclined to follow the boat in search of scraps than normal. On my trip chumming was largely dominated by Herring Gulls, but a few Gannets did show their faces and give us a diving show.

On the island itself, access is very limited. There are after all Gannets everywhere. A roughly 150m long Gannet free path winds its way up part of the island and leaving it is strictly forbidden. This should not worry you though. There are gannets within inches of the path for the majority of the path's length. The main problem is not finding or getting close to Gannets but trying to get compose a simple shot without countless other gannets in the background.

Having said that, there are plenty of different types of shot on offer. If you are low and slow, Gannets treat you as a Gannet with a territory and will respect you so long as you respect their space. In this way, you can get within two feet of a Gannet and get some wide-angle environmental shots.

One piece of behaviour to look out for is the paid bonding display. Whenever one Gannet from a pair returns to the nest, the two will great each other by knocking their beaks together. They repeat this as a reassurance to each other whenever there is a bit of argy-bargy within the colony. This can be set of by anything or nothing as Gannets shuffle their weight and feathers fly past in the wind.

Lastly, there are of course the flight shots. Gannets land pretty much randomly throughout the colony. However, they do tend to fly in against the wind. Once you know where the Gannets are coming from the odds are stacked in your favour.

By far the easiest way to photograph the Gannets in flight is to find somewhere where they are hanging in the wind. If the wind is right, Gannets angle themselves into the wind and become virtually stationary targets. The best place to find Gannets doing this on Bass Rock is down by the landing jetty.

In summary, Bass Rock is an amazing place and definitely worth a visit. I would be perfectly happy to spend a few hours on the island with our without my camera just watching the Gannets go about their daily lives. Photography on Bass Rock is certainly not easy and finding the right compositions can be a bit of a nightmare, but there are plenty of opportunities to keep any wildlife photography happy.

A walk on the Moors

This time yesterday, I was primed and ready to publish a post praising the British railway system, explaining how I shall miss it next year. One misdirected train, two taxis, thirty seven pounds, and a fair few hours later, I am not quite so keep to press the publish button. Instead, I have written a piece about a walk I took today in the Yorkshire Moors, no thanks to a certain York station announcer.

Before I launch into the post proper, I must explain that I am not a Nazi. Before you navigate away from my blog in disgust, let me reassure you that I have not been inciting racial hatred, invading any European countries, or even listening to the views of the Royal Family. It is a lot more innocuous than that.

With a day to spare in Yorkshire, I decided to test my navigational skills in preparation for walking the Pennine way and ultimately across America by navigating a few miles across a large featureless moorland aiming at a small stone carved over 3000 years ago with a swastika, hence the Nazi connection.

Anyway, I set off up the Moor, map in hand. After a mile or two, I realised that I was walking through an area the map worryingly marked "danger area!". Unhelpfully, the map gave no clue as to what dangers I might face. Regardless, I carried on, slightly wearily, looking out for low flying aeroplanes, holes in the ground, and everything in between.

Another mile or so down the path, I stumbled across a line of grouse butts. Again, do not turn away in disgust, I am not being rude! Butts are dugouts in the Moors used for shooting grouse. This was a danger more deadly than any of those I had considered. Low flying planes are all well and good, but lead shot let lose by chinless wonders wielding aging shotguns is something altogether different.

I then considered whether it was or not shooting season. Somewhere in my mind the glorious 12th stuck out. Or was it the glorious 9th? Come to think of it, which month contains this oh so glorious date? I had no idea, so illogically decided to carry on regardless.

You may by now have got the impression that I do not approve of grouse hunting. Quite the contrary, I simply do not approve of landed gentry firing bullets willy nilly in my vicinity. Without the hunters there would be no grouse and no heather Moors.

This may seem a bit backward, but the Moors are an entirely manufactured landscape. Without frequent burning by hunters, the heather would be outgrown by bracken, the bracken would be outgrown by bushes, and the bushes would be outgrown by trees. The grouse would be long gone by this point, as they rely on new heather buds and shoots for food. Three thousand odd years ago, when the prehistoric inhabitants of Ilkley Moor were carving Nazi propaganda in the hill's rocks, the area was still completely forested.

Back to the walk, my path crossed another Neolithic feature of Ilkley Moor; the twelve apostles stone circle. Now I know the circle is called the twelve apostles circle because there are twelve stones and were twelve apostles, but would it really have been so difficult to think of something that existed by the dozen when the stone circle was built to name it after?

Finally, I found myself in the area of the swastika stone. Luckily, it began to rain. This is not normally lucky, but to be honest I did not really want myself, a bearded twenty something year old, to be found scouring the Moors looking for symbols from the Third Reich, and the rain had sent most ramblers looking for shelter. In actuality, I was quite glad not all the ramblers had gone home. A small crowd of three surrounded the rock rendering it slightly easier to find. Furthermore, the smooth curves of the prehistoric swastika looked nothing like Hitler's crude straight-lined efforts.

In case you are wondering, the slight similarity between the Bronze Age swastika and Hitler's symbol in no way means that the Stone Age Britons were Nazis. It might however mean that the Nazis were Stone Aged*.

Anyway, navigational test passed, I jumped on a train back to my Grandparent's house just in time for Grandma's shepherd's pie. There is nothing quite like Grandma's cooking. Thank you Granny!

*Edit (08/07/2010): Yes Mr O'Connor, I know that the Stone Aged was not 3000-5000 years ago, I was using a little artistic license.

An announcement

When I tell people my plans for next year, I invariably get one of two reactions. People either remark that Forest Gump did something similar, or slowly back off, fixing me with confused and hostile gazes, wondering where the nearest straightjacket is and how to get me into it.

So which of Forest Gump's exploits am I so crazily going to replicate? Will I be joining the American army to fight a pointless war abroad? Perhaps I am going to run into a soon-to-be bombed forest to save the life of an ungrateful man. Or maybe I am going Shrimp fishing in a hurricane with a man with no legs?

Not quite. Even I am not quite that crazy.

Instead, I will be walking 5000 miles for charity, crossing 17 American states, leaving the Georgia's Atlantic coast on Valentine's Day 2011, and arriving nine and a half months later at the Pacific coast of Washington State.

Now I know what you are thinking; Forest Gump did not walk across America. True, but he did run across large amount of it. Lots of times. Close enough.

So how did this come about? Well one day, my old Keblite friend, and rather amusing blogger, Joe O'Connor called me, explaining his desire to pen a mammoth adventure book, preferably with someone capable of occasionally taking a professional quality image. I am not sure why he chose me, and am even less sure why I said yes, but for whatever reason I agreed and the planning began.

During that rather lengthy phone call, we hammered out a route, quickly dismissing the organised transamerican hiking trails, preferring instead to play a transcontinental game of join-the-dots. We will connect a series of points that especially interest us, spending time on parts of the Appalachian Trail, the American Discovery trail, and the Pacific Crest trail in between.

We will visit the Great Smokey Mountains, Gatlinburg Tennessee, the world's longest cave system, St Louis, Kansas City, Lake Oahe, the South Dakotan Badlands, the Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, Yellowstone, The Grand Tetons, the Great Sandy Desert, Crater Lake, and Mount Hood to name but a few.

We be soaked by thunderstorms, endure freezing temperatures, relentless heat, gale force winds, snow, and ice. Our feet will blister, or legs will ache, and our minds may break. Nevertheless, somewhere along the way, we will meet amazing people and see hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary sights.

Neither of us have done anything like this before. It will not be easy, and we will probably never speak to each other again. But, when it is done, we will almost certainly look back at it as one of the defining and most rewarding achievements of our lives.

Right now I am living a brilliant life, spending my days in the countryside taking countless photographs, but to be perfectly honest, I simply cannot wait to get going.

One last very important point. There is a serious reason behind this. It is not just Joe and I waltzing across a continent avoiding the real world by walking across as much of it as possible. We both aim to raise seriously respectable wedges of cash, be it dollars or pounds, for our respective charities.

I have put a great deal of thought into the charity I will represent. My main passion is wildlife, but I recognise that a heartfelt wildlife only approach to conservation is simply not feasible in the modern world. Successful conservation initiatives almost always involve the local community and cutting edge ecological science.

Until recently, I have been at loss to find a charity that exclusively backs exactly this kind of modern conservation. That is until the BBC Wildlife Fund popped up with their Wild Night In.

The BBC Wildlife Fund funds exactly the kind of conservation I am passionate about. They seek out projects worldwide that draw upon cutting edge science and enterprising passionate individuals to protect flagship species, help the local community, and conserve the environment as a hole. They truly make a difference.

I have just donated a small amount via the fund's Justgiving page, and would urge you to do the same, whether spurred on by our walk or not.

Oh, and we have a name for our adventure. "The Great Walk West: Being British Across America." I shall keep you posted.

New Captioning Website!

Stop! Newsflash! The Exposing The Wild Captioning System website is up and running, complete with fancy slideshows like the one below!

www.exposingthewild.com/captioning/index.html

The Captioning System has also had a revamp, and the new final draft is more comprehensive and unambiguous than ever. If anyone has any comments on the system, it would be great to hear them.

If any photographers out there would like to use the system, please do. The more the merrier! If you could just link to the website, that would be great.

My website (www.moonlightimaging.com) has also been updated and takes into account the new changes.

Unfortunately, I will be unable to update my older blog posts, I am simply too busy and have spent too many hours in front of the computer in the last few days finalising the website, as my bloodshot eyes can testify.

Anyway, that is it! The system is out there! Lets see how far we can take it.

A Complete Set

As some of you may have noticed, it is World Cup year. Not just that, it is an African World Cup year. There are few that will argue that Africa is an exceptionally diverse continent, but that it is also somewhat turbulent. The very word Africa summons up images of blood diamonds, genocide, famine, and war. But somehow this year Africans are bonding around South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, Algeria, and the Ivory Coast. They are not just their country's teams, they are African teams.

Here though, in Scotland, the natives cannot even bring themselves to support those with whom they share their peaceful North Atlantic island. The clue to the fact that the World Cup is being played is the slightly-more-miserable-than-usual faces of the Scots and the cheers whenever an Englishman makes a howler.

Down in England we would be perfectly happy to cheer on the plucky Scots. In fact we do. Every year we unite behind Andy and Jamie Murray in a storm of patriotic pride. After all, we are all part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

For now though, the English male is a little busy flying flags, drinking beer, and complaining about the referee. In the meantime, children are out on the streets fighting over who gets to be Messi and collecting stickers emblazed with names like Christos Patsatzouglou, names that they are inexplicably able to pronounce.

Virtually no one ever gets the set, but that is not really the point. The fun is in the chase. Unfortunately, I have been chasing a set which, to my complete surprise, I have just completed. For the past month mummy and daddy Great Spotted Woodpecker have been visiting one of my hides. Today, out of the blue, their chick appeared.

I suppose I must find another set to complete. Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi for Maximiliano Periera anyone?