AFTER THE SORTOUT!

I've got two 1TB hard drives on which I store my images (the same images duplicated onto each hard drive, for safety) and they are rapidly getting full. Over the last few days, and I guess the next few days as well, I've been attempting to sort through all the images with a view to deleting the not so good ones to make some space (I find the whole routine very tedious and there  are plenty of 'break times').  But so far I've had no trouble finding plenty of the 'not so good ones', it makes me wonder why I thought some of them were worth saving in the first place!

So, here is a random selection of a few of the 'better' images that seem to have slipped the net from some of my earlier posts.

A Grey Squirrel looking for somewhere to hide his Chestnut

Whilst out looking for Fungi I came across a family of Common Lizards living in the hollow and rotting branches of a fallen tree.

When I first saw them, or rather when they saw me, they hid inside the hollow wood. I slowly and quietly sat down as close as I could get and patiently waited, after about five minutes they all emerged and started to bask in the sun and didn't seem to be at all bothered by my presence.

Not far away from the spot where I found the Common Lizards I noticed this large collection of nuts by the base of a rotting tree stump, and most had a neat hole gnawed into them. Back at home I checked my reference books and matched the pattern of tooth marks on the nuts to those made by Wood Mice or Yellow-necked Mice.

Both these mice will gnaw a hole in the nut with their nose outside so that the lower incisors inside the hole leave marks on the inner slope and the upper incisors create scratch marks on the outside of the shell.

Another example of feeding activity this time pine cones before and after the attention of a Grey Squirrel.

A couple of weeks ago I went for a walk around Incombe Hole in Buckinghamshire with Keith of Holdingmoments where, for about thirty minutes, we experienced three Sparrowhawks (possibly four for a time) initially playing what looked like a game of tag before being harassed away by Magpies and Crows.

Two massively cropped images!

Who says birds can't fly upside down!

A couple of images of the area in which I do most of my walking.