TL:DR – Record shots of the three Black Terns at a local RSPB reserve. They say that one good tern deserves another, if you’re talking comic terns. So, when you go looking for on… Read More

TL:DR – Photos taken in very light with an old camera are never going to come up to snuff unless you use a denoise app like DxO’s PureRaw 3. We were up early from our camp bed ne… Read More

TL:DR – Tick list of wildlife from my return to the reserves. Finally, managed a half-decent walk (4km) around a local nature reserve with Mrs Sciencebase this morning after weeks of s… Read More

A few natural highlights from a year that’s been rather miserable in too many ways for me, but peppered with music and photography and nature. You can find the photos I took of these h… Read More

Best shot I ever got of a Bearded Reedling (Bearded Tit in old money) was from a hide WWT Welney. That was about a month after I’d bought the Sigma 150-600mm zoom for my old Canon 6D c… Read More

The Benefits of Having a Spare Car Key It is important to have a spare key for your car in the event that you need it. A transponder key is also an excellent option in the event of loss. Tra… Read More

I have put in a bit of effort to see more butterfly species over the last couple of years. Not travelling much farther than local nature reserves but homing in on ancient woodlands and sites… Read More

I’ve talked about the Common, or Eurasian, Crane on the Sciencebase site before, there are increasing numbers of this bird to be seen on our East Anglian patch, and that’s a very… Read More

We got wind of Bramblings and Smews in Needingworth, so took a 5-6 mile stroll around RSPB Ouse Fen (Needingworth side and across to the Ouse and back to the car park via the outskirts of Ha… Read More

I am bit reluctant to tell you about the little jewel I have found. It’s not three quarters of an hour’s drive from Cambridge. Although the title of this blog post sort of gives… Read More

If you were hoping to read an article with the top five ways to go viral on Instagram, then I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have any tips. I’ve been using Insta si… Read More

When it comes to local places to spot new and interesting birds, the first place you might try in this neck of the woods (as it were) are the various nature reserves we have within a few cli… Read More

Sometimes you have to step back from how you normally do something to find a way to do that thing better. For a year or more, I’ve tended to set my camera shutterspeed to about 1/1000t… Read More

UPDATE: 20:45, same day – The National Trust has issued a new statement just hours after I posted this, no longer allowing access to their land other than the public places they manage… Read More

If you walk the places I walk you will have passed noisy reed beds a lot recently. There are many birds that like to breed, nest, eat and play among the reeds. But, many of them are quite sh… Read More

The White Stork, Ciconia ciconia, is a scientific tautonym, its binomial being duplicated to indicate that ciconia is the “type”, the archetype, of the family Ciconia. This is th… Read More

Over the last few months I’ve got to learn a little about the birds we call warblers. It was always a joke between Mrs Sciencebase and myself, if we heard a tweet we didn’t recog… Read More