best part of the day: nine days later

I had been watching the forecast like a hawk for a sunny day to return to Saltoun Big Wood. Wednesday the 6th seemed propitious, nine days after my last visit and I hoped that was enough time for the Southern hawkers and black darters to have appeared and maybe the scabious buds of butterfly alley would have opened. I freely admit I become obsessed with Saltoun at this time of the year and last year took 7 visits to capture the jollies. On the right day it can be a wonderful place.

I opted for bus and hoof. To catch the reliably unreliable 113 from Abbeyhill to Pencaitland and then run the 3 miles up the cyclepath and into the wood via the Barley Mill back door. Partly because there was a strong wind forecast which would make the return leg cycle grim, partly because between the end of the cyclepath and Barley Mill there is a garden with a large buddleia that can be a butterfly magnet at this time of the year.

As usual I was cutting it fine leaving the flat, and I had to leg it up Easter Road at a gallop to get to the bus stop at 9.30am. Where I then waited 20minutes for the bus. No surprise, but not a great start either. I plugged in an audio book and the hour passed quickly before I jumped off in the middle of Pencaitland and walked and jogged up the cyclepath. I didn't notice it at the time but the action of my jammed full back pack (camera, lenses, sandwiches, juice reservoir, kneepads, birdfood, secateurs, wallet and mobile) bumping on my lower back as I ran set off a sciatica problem that had been percolating for a week or two, and since Wednesday I have been struggling and limping with it. It was such an outstanding day though, that it was a small price to pay.

Just beyond the cyclepath as I descended towards Barley Mill, I could see a conga line of 4 or 5 white butterflies dancing above the buddleia bush. The timing was spot on and the bush was alive with admirals, peacocks, commas, and whites. It is a large buddleia situated right up against the far side of a hedge in a large garden below the level of the road. So the top of the bush is around head-height and perfect for shooting over the hedge. When a car passes by all the butterflies leap up into the air and then settle again. I stood for exactly 30minutes taking photos.

And while I was there a small bird flew over to see what I was up to. Not one I had seen before and which google later confirmed was a spotted flycatcher. A very nice start to the day!

The most numerous species seemed to be whites. There was one or 2 large whites in good condition but several were a bit shredded. The admirals (3~5) seemed in excellent condition as did the peacocks which maybe didn't enjoy my company and disappeared after a short while. I didn't notice 3 or 4 commas until the end of the session and wondered if the bush was visited by different species at different times throughout the day. There were speckled woods as well but they were not so interested in nectaring on the buddleia plumes as just doing their usual; hanging about the dappled sunshine in local trees which surrounded the large garden.

last year I'd managed to take photos of an admiral on an apple in an apple tree
next door to the buddleia - nearly but not quite this year

large whites

nearest to a shot with an apple

speckled record shot - they were there but not on the flowers

then some commas appeared

small white in flight

a threefer

large white in flight

the buddleia bush behind the hedge
well worth a visit if you're near West Saltoun

speckled

least likely visitor - a common darter
(a stream runs through the garden)

pristine large white

I was keen to get going up to the wood in case the weather (fairly sunny with some cloud cover) didn't last. I could easily have stayed another 30minutes to see what turned up, but reckoned I'd got the best of the action. Time to see what lurked in the woods. One of the first things I encountered was Keith again. We chatted about wildlife and the state of the wood and how it seems to have survived the tree cull.

the teasels near the first pond were less busy than last time

there were still quite a few peacocks around the place

lots of common darters pondside

newly emerged darter

some of the felled trees - or rather, their stumps

I was a little bit disappointed with the first pond. The sun was behind clouds and as a result not many dragonflies skimmed the water. Rather than wait I thought I'd go look for butterflies up the back trail and return if/when it got sunnier later. It was a decent warm day and there were lots of insects about the place. I was like a pig in shit as they say!

common hawker at the second pond beyond the crossroads

emerald damselfly

At the second pond, the large one up the hill a bit, the sun was emerging from cloud-cover and a few larger hawkers were buzzing round the perimeter. I suspected there might be Southerns in their number but I wasn't getting much in the way of photos and they weren't close enough to detect the fluro yellow dots of the Southern hawkers. Otherwise they are very similar looking to common hawkers although slightly more generous about hovering nearby, and having a good look, presumably out of curiosity. I'd seen amazing footage (on youTube go to 4m30s) of one in slo-mo super close-up while it hovered very close to the cameraman (about the best I've seen doing UK wildlife), and I hoped to emulate this myself. It was shot using similar gear to mine (although he has a £6k+ lens) so technically it was possible but of course the hard part is getting the wildlife to collaborate. (And those were Southern Migrants not Southern hawkers). But I enjoy the hunt and being outdoors, so it is no hardship on a beautiful summer day to wander round this oasis of wildlife, seeing who is up for a photoshoot. Nowhere I'd rather be!

this tangy fresh comma was sunbathing at the old woodpile

evidence of recent logging near the second pond

peacock
(with left antenna cut short)

When I got to the back trail my spirits rose. Not that I was down in the dumps. I was having a great day so far. However the devil's bit scabious had gone (in 9 days) from buds to flowering and very quickly I realised the annual display was well under way, perhaps a week or more ahead of the usual date. This had rallied loads of peacock butterflies who fluttered up and down the back trail feeding on the purple-lilac flowers. As well as hoverflies, admirals, whites and walls. There were a few commas and speckleds as well but the peacocks were out in the largest numbers and nearly all in perfect condition. It was difficult to know where to point the camera and which delights to focus upon. Just a real joy to be here, nobody else for miles, and dozens, maybe hundreds of butterflies and bugs. I was getting hungry for the sandwiches in my bag but there seemed no opportunity to get them out before being distracted by yet another perfect specimen posing in the warm sunshine! Bliss!

Eristalis (arbustorum?) - drone-fly

green veined white - a few brand new specimens about

again a few commas about
but their numbers will increase greatly over the next 3 weeks

female wall in great condition

Usually by the time I get hooked on the back trail at SBW the walls have come and gone. Just the occasional one limping about, a bit tattered. Because I'd started early this year I caught some nearer prime condition, though as they arrive just ahead of the scabious it is not so easy to get them in decent numbers, isolated on flowerheads. So today was possibly the best chance to catch a few photos of the later emergers still in the flush of youth sitting atop flowers sufficiently distracted to have their photos taken. They can be more flighty and many, when they sensed I was approaching, flew onto low ground as if they knew I wasn't interested in photos of them sitting on the dirt and grass. The peacocks and admirals aren't overjoyed to have me poking the camera at them but are perhaps a little more engrossed in the feeding business to mind, as long as I approach with consideration. Also the majority of today's butterfly photos were taken with the long lens which gives me more distance from them.

RA in flight

"butterfly alley"

unusual to see a robin here

male wall on knapweed flower

I walked up to the top corner. The last section used to be the best butterfly area but this is not really the case now. Well, so far this year. The scabious have been slightly effected by the forestry machinery and there are larger strips without the flowers lining the trail. They thin out towards the top and a large pile of offcuts dominates the small clearing where once dozens of butterflies gathered. This is perhaps the biggest casualty of the felling. In other places along the trail knapweed is more abundant than the scabious and seems just as popular with the butterflies and hoverflies.

a fine male wall loses my interest by landing
on a mostly meh background

small copper

Usually there are a few small copper about. Today I only found 2 and both of them chasing each other round this heather. One was a bit older but this one was fairly new and had a great metallic sheen about it. It was quite excitable though and didn't hang around to be photo-ed.

syrphus

hoverfly and carder bee

Chaetostomella cylindrica (or similar)

I was pleased to spot this tiny fruit fly on a lower leaf of knapweed. It posed well and seemed keen to be in the blog. I like these and other small fruit flies as they often have more interesting markings and particularly psychedelic looking eyes. If I hadn't been surrounded by butterflies whizzing around I might have changed to the macro lens to get decent shots. I read this particular species is often found on knapweed. (Larvae feed in the buds of knapweed and thistles.)

I played about with the pre-burst mode taking a sequence of photos of hoverflies taking off from the knapweed. However some species esp larger butterflies work better than small butterflies or hoverflies. I liked the above image but the majority were straight-to-the-bin jobs. It was this sort of thing that added to a huge total of images taken today. 1981 I think! Nearly 2 thousand photos and videos!

Due to the burst mode fairly adding about 20+ images per sequence and most sequences producing no usable images accounts for the total number of photos here being less than the usual batting average of 10% making the blog. (Thanks goodness I hear you say!) The files off the SD card took up 17GB of hard drive and if I had been using Raw it would have been heading towards 100GB. One of the reasons I don't feel the need to use Raw. Which I hear is great for rescuing bad photos. If you take a lot of bad photos.

It could be my eyes but I don't see a lot of difference between my results and those of folk who highly process their Raw photos through photo-editing, noise reduction and the like. I do see people oversharpening their photos (particularly macro) and horrible overuse of saturation; mistakenly thinking that that improves the image. I am no doubt guilty of some myself - when you edit the fiftieth consecutive largely green photo with red butterfly my eyes have probably stopped seeing the colours accurately and I should take a break and come back later.

After a while I realised I was in danger of just taking the same photo again and again. Butterfly on scabious, butterfly on knapweed. The images I like most go one step further and are sometimes achieved by getting the camera angle really low and down among the flowers. I spent quite some time squatting, kneeling and lying on the ground. I look through the EVF rather than use the screen so there was a lot of rolling about on the thankfully dry trail. This may have contributed to the achy back and leg I am currently recovering from.

Or getting down in the ditches which line both sides of the back trail. When it works it produces the feeling of being at butterfly level, the view from the next flower along and not just standing over a flower taking a standard photo. Also I like to shoot towards the light rather than with the sun behind, lighting things nicely but safely. I was also keeping the aperture in mind all the time, whether to make the focal plane as short as possible and blur out the background or keep slightly more in focus including background plants or foliage. It was a pleasant change having so many available subjects that I could mess about and if something didn't work there'd be another chance to try something different with the next butterfly which was only a couple of metres away.

I was so in the zone this dogwalker drew level
and said hello before I realised I had company!

I was shooting this RA when

a photobombing comma made like Keanu Reeves...

and took over the scabious flower...

although the admiral made a come back

I know kung fu

I'm not sure all these similar shots are required
but I couldn't make up my mind which to delete.

It was a spectacular butterfly
and I'm not sure I did it justice

and it flew off before I was done

fabulous to see so many red admirals

synchro pair!

similarly, twins!

I was sorely tempted to photoshop out that plant on the left of the above image. There was nothing I could do about it at the time - sometimes you can move to one side to get rid of a grass stalk or do a bit of gardening in situ while hopefully not chasing off the subject. But the walls were particularly flighty and if I'd gone near that plant on the left the butterfly would have flown. If it had been nearer the perfect shot I'd maybe have cloned out the extra plant but I don't use AI stuff and doing it by hand is about 20minutes fiddly work. I did a little of this on one or 2 other images but most are very nearly as they came out the camera. A bit of a crop and adjust the contrast etc. Not much. Although if a minute on each photo it's still 2 hrs to sort 120 photos. Since I no longer paint or draw this fulfils my creative drive and I quite enjoy it, although it takes up a lot of time.

I really enjoyed butterfly alley and it was like coming back to planet earth to go back down the trail to the ponds. I hadn't even felt the lack of painted ladies or small tortoiseshells was down on previous years because there were so many peacocks, walls and admirals. (Maybe the small torts and PLs will appear later.)

The sun was now a bit more visible and I hoped the dragonflies were out and about. They were, but I couldn't see any Southern hawkers or black darters. I thought I saw one black darter but it flew off and didn't return to the spot, around which I hovered for 10 minutes. Oh well, something to look forward to next visit. Last year I think there were more S hawkers at the second large pond which I scrutinised for a while. Pairs of darters dipped their end in the water, egglaying, and sat on the warm sand. No definite sightings of anything Southern. Maybe the close-up slo-mo would have to wait as well.

common blue damsels

common hawker
(and harvestman far left)

On my way back to the first pond I saw this common hawker on a birch. It is always worth looking at the tree trunks for resting hawkers although I suspect they more often prefer high up on the tree canopies. However I regularly see them on boughs and more often than not, silver birches. They may be snoozing but they have good eyesight and even though I approached this one super-cautiously, I only got a couple of pics before it woke up and fucked off. I wasn't best pleased as I'd just changed lenses to macro and hoped to get in close before it realised. I also had to change battery, which prompted the lens change. I'd already cruised through the first battery. I managed to get 1599 photos which is a decent count from one fully charged battery. I rarely take more than this during a single day. I always carry a second charged battery and second blank SD card. I hope never to fill the 60GB card but they can malfunction or they can be left in the card reader, so a back up in the bag is a good idea.

So I now had the macro lens on and hoped to use it around the first pond. There were more hawkers out than before but I didn't have high hopes for shooting them, as they are the least cooperative of the dragonflies. Because I had the macro lens on I was checking out all the insects sat atop the yarrow and other umbellifers. Nothing particularly exotic, just the usual suspects.

Tachina fera(?)

There was a rather obliging darter sitting on a reed. It must have been fairly new (teneral) as it let me hold the stem it was on (to stop it blowing back and forth in the breeze) and turn it whichever way to line up shots for the macro. Since I had the chance, I took some pics trying to focus on the neck joint just below the (backs of the) eyes. It has always looked to me like a universal joint and is probably quite similar, to allow the head to swivel in most directions. In many animals this is covered with flesh, a mane or woven tapestry etc. But here, what looks like a spine protrudes from the abdomen and joins the head using something like a universal joint. You can see the workings and it is awesome and a little bit OMG, like most good nature close up.

those eyes look out-of-focus until you get in closer...

Again taking advantage of such an obliging subject, I took a few shots and close-ups from a couple of angles. In my defence I wasn't using a flash and left the darter in exactly the same place I found it. Hopefully I didn't scar its early childhood with nightmarish visions of a giant one-eyed Lumix monster leaning down and peering at it!

glassy wings confirm a teneral specimen

another close up of those awesome eyes!

Erystalis tenax (?) waving hello - common drone fly
If tenax, then the most widely distributed syrphid species in the world

The macro lens is set at 90mm (equivalent 180mm ff) and I wondered how it would fare compared to the 100~400 zoom for capturing hawkers in flight. Technically it should be easier to get the dragonflies in the frame but maybe not so good for accommodating the distance and if they are a little way off (and they can be wary of humans) then you can't zoom in. I went round the pond anti-clockwise to the first corner where I have had interactions with black darters. I didn't find any there but there were a few hawkers regularly passing close to the edge of the water checking the grasses and reeds for females.

At one point I saw a female hawker sneak into that same vegetation to egglay. She was mostly stationary and the patrolling males (examining that area) flew right past. I had thought their large eyes must be highly perceptive - they fly at such speed and never appear clumsy - but it made me reassess their vision. That perhaps it is adapted more to movement rather than stationary shapes and objects. They certainly seem to be aware of humans approaching, but if you move very slowly there is more chance to get up close.

In trying to emulate the youTube clip from UK Wildlife I set my camera to record slo-mo video at 120 frames per second. Normal is around 25 so this was 4.8 times slower. Paying more attention to that youTube clip I see he sets his camera to 10 times slower (240fps). I may try that next time and see how it compares, although just a couple of seconds would mean a 20second clip which will fill up the hard drive really quickly. It is rare that a common hawker will hover for longer than a second in the right place just in front of the camera (while I get it in focus and not the background) then push the start button. (The shutter release in S&Q mode.) However maybe because it was towards the end of a busy day, the hawkers might have been a little tired, or a little curious, or whatever reason, but I got three or four clips of one sitting in the air reasonably close by. And the best clip (the first I shot) the last few seconds of the video below, was nearly miraculous in the detail it captured against a beautifully blurred out background. Since I was so busy trying to shoot stuff I didn't chimp it at the time, and had no idea how well it had come out. It was a real OMG moment when I uploaded it to the computer.

Next time I may try just a bit faster than 120fps to see if the camera can keep up with the wingbeats, they are still a bit flickery at 120. Although I am super-impressed with the results which I didn't think would come out as well as they did. Such was the detail captured, I was able to extract any number of still frames, (these 7 photos here) from the video. I shot in HD. The camera can record slo-mo 4k video but might need connected to a mini hard drive to record onto, for that. I haven't spent much time looking into it but for fast moving subjects like dragonflies it can get amazing results.

These 3 pics are lifted directly from the last 11.5 second clip
of video which took just 2.3 seconds in real life

The plan is to try more of this and hopefully get the subject facing the camera next time. Also I'm hoping the Southern hawkers and black darters are more obliging although I did get fairly lucky with the common hawkers and can't really complain about these results which are the first time I've tried slo-mo video of dragonflies. I have a feeling it could be beginner's luck and might actually be the high point of my video career. Watch this space. We'll see how it goes.

hawkers in flight - slo-mo

Unfortunately there is no soundtrack when shooting slo-mo. It does seem a bit lifeless to view without an audio track so I chose some music to add to it. 'Cmon' by Fred again and Brian Eno. I wanted something that referenced the wingbeats while having an otherworldliness or transcendental feeling.

Between hawker passes I was looking around for macro subjects. This common blue damselfly let me get close enough for a head and shoulders close-up.

saw fly, Tenthredo sp.

record shot of the only small skipper of the day

At this point I changed back to the 400mm lens. I wanted to get closer to hovering hawkers that weren't hovering near me, but no further video was shot. I waited a bit longer but decided it was home time. I still had to get back to Pencaitland (3miles) for a bus home (another hour) and I'd been out for more than 5 hrs.

A last check round and I saw a hawker settled on the birch beside the pond. It didn't sit there long; when I approached it flew off. I watched it do a circuit and then consider landing again but saw myself and thought better of it. I retreated and watched from a distance. Sure enough it returned and so did I. It flew off again and I think there might have been another round or maybe we were both tired of that game by then. I was ready to head home and could barely move under the weight of accumulated photos on my SD card. 😆