After a cloudy morning, the sun came out in the afternoon, so I put the big telephoto on the camera, fitted the monopod, and headed down the track to the river.

The air was cold, but the sun was high enough to be warming and bright enough to dazzle. The ducks on the river were obviously feeling the approach of spring, and on the steep slope running up from the river to the fields, plenty of rabbits were feeding or running about on the open grass.

When I came to the wood, I looked around, and my eye was caught by a patch of colour on the ground beside a tree at the very top of the slope. I swung my lens up towards it, and was delighted by the sight of a fox, lying outside a hole, basking in the sunlight.

I stood there for a while, taking photographs as I stared through the lens at the fox and he stared back down the lens at me. After a while, his eyelids began to droop and he resumed his dozing in the sunshine. Obviously, he considered me too far away to be a threat.

When I was sure that I had exhausted the photographic possibilities of the situation, I began to climb the slope, at a diagonal to the fox, so that it would appear that I was not approaching him directly. I then stopped and focussed on him again. I had his full atttention.

I took more photographs, and again his eyelids began to droop. I could now see that he was lying beside a hole at the base of the tree. Had he spent the day in the hole, and then emerged into the intoxication of the spring sunshine and the fresh air? I began to climb the slope again, this time on the opposite diagonal, and I saw him rise to his feet, imagined the regretful sigh as he became reconciled to the necessity of movement. I stopped and took more photographs as he moved reluctantly towards the wood, and as he disappeared from sight, I dropped down the slope again and entered the wood quietly.

It’s early March, the best time of year for seeing woodland wildlife. The trees are in bud, holding the promise of the thick sun-cover to come, but the sunshine penetrates to the floor and the trees are transparent, right up to their canopy. I moved through the wood silently, towards the area the fox might be if he did not immediately clear off for pastures new – I was encouraged by his leisurely attitude to think that he might not have done that.

I stood there and waited, every sense alert. The human eye has an incredible ability to spot movement, but as I have aged, the occasional “floater” in my eye betrays me, and I have to put up with the occasional distraction in which my eye leaps to a movement, only to find that it has been caused by an artefact in my vision, a piece of material in my eyeball intersecting with a light-coloured object in my field of view.

Then I saw it. It was the same colour that had caused my eye to leap towards it as I walked along the river’s edge. Not fox – my vision was not good enough to resolve details of shape – but fox colour. I quickly turned the long lens on the patch of colour, and there was the fox staring intently at me. Not sleepy any more, but wide awake, fully aware of the possibility of deadly danger, intent on survival.

We stared at each other from opposite ends of my long telephoto lens, learning each other’s details to the extent that they could be seen, for what seemed an age, until he turned away and disappeared from view.

I moved quickly up through the wood to gain a view over the fields, full of sheep with their young lambs, but there was no sign of the fox. He was elsewhere, gone, departed.

But his patch is my patch – I have seen him before, as he has seen me. With good fortune to us both, we will see each other again.

As we drove around the twisting gravel roads of the Otago peninsula, there seemed to be harriers around every corner, gliding along hillsides, playing high up in the wind currents, gleaning morsels from the short surface vegetation of the inlet edges.

Turning a corner in the looping track around Hooper’s Inlet, I saw one glide in to some vegetation at the bottom of a wooded slope, and disappear from view. When we arrived opposite this point, I scanned the spot carefully with binoculars, but could see no sign of the bird or a nest. I noted the spot and we carried on our way.

A couple of days later, I decided to have a closer or longer look. As I drove around the corner that brought the nest site into view, there was the harrier just landing again, but this time as I pulled up against the fence, there was a chick in view exercising its wings.

Get down out of sight, you idiot!

After a short while, adult and chick disappeared into the foliage, and I settled down to await developments. Eventually, I could again make out a chick, which seemed to be making feeding movements. Time passed, and the grey shape behind the vegetation resolved itself into two chicks.

Meanwhile, the adults appeared, gliding along the ridge above the nest, and I readied myself for the shot I was looking for, of an adult about to land in the nest. However, it didn’t happen – one bird flew off while the other landed in a tree some distance away. After a while, I noticed that it had gone, but I had not seen it fly off. All was revealed when the head of an adult bird appeared with the chicks – it had flown down to the ground and walked into the nest, presumably to avoid giving away its location with me sitting in my car watching.

There was more activity discernible behind the vegetation, some wing-flapping and other movements indicating feeding, and eventually, I had to revise numbers up again – there were three chicks in the nest!

Eventually, the adult flew up from the nest are with a large bone in its bill and flew off. There was no more activity visible, so I left after a while.

Several days later, I drove around Papanui Inlet on a cold and windy day, and when I arrived at the car park at the end of the track, I decided to sit and watch birds in the open area in front of me, rather than face the walk to Victory Beach.

There was a lot of birds on the sheep-grazed pasture in front of me – paradise shelducks, pukeko, spur-winged plovers and a small flock of starlings, but the stars were a pair of harriers which quartered the ground, using the wind superbly to hover, to glide around clumps of rushes and folds in the ground, to catch the wind and wheel away to a new area to hunt.

At the back of the pasture was a block of conifers, and one of the harrier’s favourite moves was to glide through the upper branches, head down, no doubt hoping to surprise an unwary rabbit. A place for a hide and a photo-opportunity!

It’s summer in December again! We have escaped from Britain during an interval in the unaccustomed snow and freezing temperatures, and now bask in the sunshine on the other side of the world – in Dunedin, New Zealand.

As soon as was decently possible, I drove out to the hills of the Otago Peninsula, which separates Dunedin’s long, dog-legged harbour, set in the remains of an ancient volcano, from the Pacific Ocean. The winding road along the top was just the same as I remembered it, showing vertiginous drops down to sandy beaches edging the ocean on one side, and winding across to spectacular views of Otago Harbour on the other.

As I turned off the ridge road onto the dirt track which dropped down to skirt huge shallow inlets filled with seawater and silt, I wondered how the wildlife had fared in the three years since my last visit. Driving around Hooper’s Inlet, I asked myself whether there would be any spoonbills around the next corner. Yes, there was! Half a dozen were striding through the shallow water, swishing their bills from side to side, white feathers ruffled by the wind and gleaming in the sun as they filtered the water for sustenance.  After a few more bends around the edge of the inlet, would there be a kingfisher on the power lines? Yes, there he was, scanning for insects the sparse vegetation which encroached on the silt at this point. Was he the same one that occupied this territory three years ago, or one of his children?

No matter, all was as it should be. Paradise shelducks grazed the meadows, harriers quartered the sides of the hills and the dune flats, black-winged stilts and spurred plovers patrolled the water’s edge and further out were the ducks, black swans and the occasional white-faced heron.

I made my way to a beach where I had watched blue penguins come out of the sea in the half light after sunset. These little penguins had some human friends who had provided them with nestboxes, and I wanted to see if they were still there.

Sure enough, there were the nestboxes, with little penguin footprints all around, and the inevitable trap with poison bait to protect them from predators. I wondered who provided the nestboxes for this little colony, and whether they felt that the penguins were thriving – there were about the same number of nestboxes as there had been three years ago.

I was thinking about things like this as I made my way back, walking along the sand beside the rocky cliff. Suddenly, a rock beside me lunged upwards with a loud “Grarrrff!!” and changed into a fur seal, considerably upset by my unintended close approach – to about a metre! Grateful that I had not been punished for my carelessness, I took his photograph as he regarded me reproachfully, and continued on my way.

When I finished making my bat detector – frequency division type, circuit by Tony Messina – I needed to test it. Unfortunately, our bats had all gone into hibernation, so first I built a pulse unit to give me a 40khz noise – that worked. Then I tried it out on running water from a tap – that worked as well. However, it all seemed rather unsatisfactory, and I wanted to know how well it worked on real bats, what it sounded like with real bats, how far away it could detect them.

Then I thought of Chester Zoo and its Twilight Zone! They have a big building in which they keep the lighting on at night, and off during the day. As you walk through the main room, making your way by means of very dim lighting, you can just make out the bats hanging around (literally!) the place, and occasionally fluttering from one roost to another.

When I got to the Zoo at opening time (10.00 am), I was disappointed to find that the Twilight Zone – now renamed the Fruit Bat Forest – was shut and wouldn’t open until 12.30 because the time shift of the lighting had been altered to enable work on lots of changes in the place. I didn’t mind too much – I always enjoy spending time at Chester Zoo.

I looked for my favourite animals – the Asian Short Clawed Otters – in their new enclosure, but they were sensibly keeping warm and out of sight. Most Zoo animals do not seem to see the public outside their enclosures or cages – I suppose that it must appear to them like wrap-around TV with the same boring programme on all the time. The otters often seemed to be interested in their audience, sometimes standing on their hind legs to inspect us and chattering to each other, no doubt about the peculiarities of the visitors of the day.

The tropical house held some inmates I had not seen before – poison dart frogs. I spent some time photographing them, trying to capture their amazing colours. Time passed quickly, and it did not seem very long before I was making my way into the Fruit Bat Forest. I switched on the bat detector before entering the main room, and held it carefully – the slightest movement of my hand on the box caused a loud series of clicks – then walked through the double set of plastic sheets into the bat’s room.

As I stood waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, the detector produced small noises now and then, and at first, I wasn’t sure if it was caused my my hand moving on the box. The clicks did not seem to correlate with a bat flying past me, but I slowly realised that the noises were indeed caused by the bats, and that they did not need to be close by for their ultrasonic squeaks to be detected.

Then I noticed a member of staff filling feeders on some trees in the central area, so I pointed the detector towards them. When she finished and left, I was deafened by the racket that the detector produced – the bats which descended on the feeders were obviously screeching at each other ultrasonically as they competed for the food.

So, it works. Summer starts for me in two weeks time, when we leave for New Zealand, and I shall take the bat detector with me. We shall be staying with daughter Sue and her family in Dunedin, South Island, for six weeks. Long enough to find out whether any of New Zealand’s only native mammals are in the woods around Dunedin.

Bill showed me the papery ball attached to the fence wire. He said “I was strimming the hedge, and when I got to here, they all came pouring out. I got stung ten times!” I was looking for the best angle to photograph the wasps’ nest, and I gently pulled a piece of vegetation out of the way. There was an angry hum and an immediate outpouring of wasps, so I took to my heels – Bill was a trifle slower, so he got stung again.

A while later, I photographed the nest, carefully, with no interference from the wasps, then I explained the new concept to Bill. “I’ll come back with my extra long USB leads, and after setting up the camera on the tripod, I’ll sit thirty yards away up the road with my laptop connected to the camera. You twitch the hedge and leg it, and I’ll get the shot of the wasps pouring out of the nest.”

Bill’s response showed that he did not have what it takes to make it as a wildlife photographer’s assistant, so when I returned a few days later, I brought a ball of string as well as my photo-technological gear. I intended to tie it to the barbed wire so that I could give it a tug to annoy the wasps from a safe distance, and then photograph them emerging mob-handed, using the laptop to trigger the camera.

Burdened with gear, I walked up the lane beside Bill’s neatly strimmed hedge to the point where the verge remained rank and overgrown. To my surprise and disappointment, the papery globe no longer existed. The top of the nest remained in place, a couple of fragments rested on the lower strand of barbed wire, and a few more lay on the ground. About half a dozen disconsolate wasps still hung around the bits and pieces of their home.

I’d seen this sort of thing before, and was pretty sure I knew who the culprits were. They came most evenings to Bill’s wood to take advantage of the fare he put out for them.

I stomped back up the lane and met Bill outside his house. “Your bloody badgers have ate my wasps’ nest!” I shouted in disgust. For some reason, Bill did not share my disappointment and frustration, but seemed to view the fate of my wasps with equanimity, perhaps even with a touch of hilarity.

And so there is another untaken photograph in my mind’s eye. Does a swarm of wasps emerging from their nest look as fearsome as I imagine? I don’t know, but I will take the first opportunity to find out when I next come across a wasps’ nest, before a badger can intervene and thwart me.