Bats on the Alyn

Photography, Wildlife

You may recall that I was fascinated last year by the Daubenton’s bats hunting over a pool on the River Alyn, which runs into the Dee not far from Wrexham. After trying to photograph them by hand, I started a project to photograph them using a laser beam and electronic flash.

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I thought that the bats were flying in and out of the mill race in the above photograph, so, having perfected my equipment over winter, I set up a laser beam across the gap. Guess what? The bats zoomed around the pool, went past the mill race opening many times, but did not enter the opening and break the beam once! Either they have changed their behaviour, or I was wrong – easy to do, maybe, as the bats did not appear until it was quite dark.

However, the flash went off several times. When I went through the pictures – there were a lot, as the camera lens is open all the time, just closing momentarily in order to avoid problems associated with long exposure times – I found that among them was this one, with a red dot in it.

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Enlarging the red dot tremendously, I have this:

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This is the midge that set off the flash by interrupting the laser beam, photographed from about 4 metres away with a Canon 500mm f4, proving that my focus was pretty good – note the wings and flash-illuminated legs.

So no bats, but an indication that success was possible if the laser beam was where the bats were flying!

Mature Cheshire Woodland

Nature, Recent Work

Dead trees standing, providing nest holes for birds, dead trees rotting on the ground providing food for a multitude of creatures. Stream at the bottom of the slope, which created this wooded valley in the sandy soil, running down to the River Weaver. Home to badgers, foxes, otters and the rest of the ecosystem.

Paul Nyamaah–Stamp Carver

Ghana

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Paul lives in the village of Ntonso in the Ashanti region of Ghana. It is well known for its textile industry and is visited by many tourists. The textile workers of Ntonso specialise in a traditional textile called adinkra, which is used in mourning ceremonies. It is a cloth which is dyed black, and then marked with a different dye using stamps and other tools. Paul carves the stamps which are used to apply the dye to the cloth.

 

 

 

 

Stamps used in the production of adinkra textiles, made from calabash. Ntonso, Ghana.

 

The stamps which are used to apply the dye are also sold to tourists as artistic objects in their own right, being representations of traditional patterns, all of which have meaning.

 

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Paul showed me the pattern which he intended to carve for me – called Fihankra, signifying safety or security in a home.

 

Making an adinkra stamp from calabash, Ntonso, Ghana.

 

His raw material is calabash, the hard-wearing seedcase which is used in a hundred different ways throughout Ghana. Paul obtains his calabash from traders who have used it to transport shea butter to Ntonso from northern Ghana, where the shea tree grows. Shea butter is extracted from the tree’s fruits, and is used as a cosmetic and in cooking.

 

Making an adinkra stamp from calabash, Ntonso, Ghana.

 

The first step is to cut the calabash fragment to the right size and then to mark guidelines for the pattern on the calabash shell.

 

 

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Making an adinkra stamp from calabash, Ntonso, Ghana.

Paul then uses a number of small knives to cut the pattern into the calabash shell, and constructs a handle from slivers of bamboo.

 

 

Making an adinkra stamp from calabash, Ntonso, Ghana.

Making an adinkra stamp from calabash, Ntonso, Ghana.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul said that he was good at art when he was in school, so that was a good reason for becoming an adinkra stamp carver. He earns his living by selling his stamps to the textile workers, but also to tourists, for whom he has a table displaying stamps he has carved – some of which have been used.

Stamps used in the production of adinkra textiles, made from calabash. Ntonso, Ghana.

Sleepy Fox

Wildlife

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.

Fox basking in sunshine

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 Alert foxemerged 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.