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After the blue skies and high cirrus of early morning (see earlier post), things steadily clouded over during the morning.  The journey down to the station was enlivened, however, by the fact that the time of year has come for mallards to be choosing bizarre places to think about nesting. Note that she doesn’t entirely trust her male guards to alert her to danger (click on images to see larger versions):

The sky was still streaked with high cirrus as we swept past St Andrew’s Church, Marks Tey courtesy of Abellio Greater Anglia en-route to Stratford from Colchester.

…and there was even still a fair amount of blue sky over the oil-seed rape fields as we headed towards Kelvedon, although the cirrus was thickening into bands of cirrostratus:

Towards Chelmsford, however, a truly weird bank of cloud developed, looming over New Hall School, just east of Chelmsford. It looked as though it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be threatening stratocumulus, pannus or full-blown mamma:

After Chelmsford, the view south towards Galleywood and Billericay had a sky full of cirrostratus blotting out all signs of blue sky, beneath which were thickening bands of stratocumulus with praecipitatio giving everything beneath a good shower:

Things just remained grey and damp for the rest of the day…

Up early again last Thursday, though not before dawn this time.  The sky was looking rather interesting so it was a case of grabbing wellies, coats and cameras and heading off out into the fields.  The sky was streaked with high cirrus (click on images for larger versions):

It feels distinctly as though the birdlife is more casual about human presence early in the morning. Blue-tits, blackbirds, great-tits all seemed largely un-bothered as I walked past:

Then I became aware that I was also being watched – by a normally-timid woodpigeon attempting to look like an ivy leaf:

Walking along the farm track there seemed to be a great deal of activity associated with a hedge up ahead, while the sky continued to do its cirrus thing:

A robin seemed to feel that it owned the hedge:


Meanwhile I was being scolded by a blue-tit who was busy hunting insects in the blackthorn flowers in the bushes behind me, although it decided against outright confrontation:

…when a flash of colour in the corner of my eye caught my attention. A jay flew into the same blackthorn bushes. It soon became obvious that it was flying back and forth between the field behind the blackthorn and a location some way down the hedge in front of me, carrying twigs for nest-building. Eventually I realised that there were two, operating in relays, and it was fascinating to watch the fact that they flew through the air like swimmers through water, giving a flap then gliding with wings against the body before flapping again. Approaching the nesting hedge they always did a spectacular braking flare:










Then suddenly all hell broke loose. The jays started screeching like a cockatoo with laryngitis, actually jumping up and down with anger, and I realised that a magpie had sneaked into their hedge from the far side, to investigate their nest. There was a huge amount of flapping, barging and swearing, until eventually the magpie fled into a nearby tree-top, chased by the jays. Eventually one of them looked down at me as if to say, “Well, what do you think of that? The cheek of it..!!”

Then to round off a thoroughly exciting early morning stroll, a pair of yellowhammers leapt out of the hedge as I was heading home and perched on the hedge-top, providing a lovely view of them:

…and so, home past the fields of sprouting wheat, then off to work…

Apologies for the silence but it’s been a busy couple of months at the university producing a range of environmental material for partner organisations.  More about that over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, and given that Etsy provides a rather simpler shop set-up than building my own web-store, I’ve also now created a RichardLindsayArts store on Etsy to complement my existing web-store, which will itself have a major overhaul shortly.

There’s just a few items in the Etsy store at the moment to establish the various types of products, but I’ll be filling the store with more items over the next two or three weeks.

On-line store update :

Images for download purchase are proving more arduous to set up in store than initially appeared.  Consequently uploading all the files currently available in the shop image galleries for printed photos will take a some days to achieve for the Downloadable photographs section of the store, but I’ll aim to add at least a few per day.  Image details (species names and so on) will also be expanded upon later.

After a steep learning-curve worthy of the Matterhorn, the on-line store for Richard Lindsay Arts and Letters officially opened today.

To enter the store, either click on the Store button top-right on the front page of this blog site, or go direct to richardlindsayartsandletters.com

The store offers the opportunity to purchase (at very modest prices) prints of the various photographic images that have featured here or on the linked Facebook page.  It also offers larger canvas prints at slightly less modest prices, plus the opportunity to purchase full-sized download version of these (again, at modest prices, although if the download is for commercial use it would be kind if you could e-mail richard@richardlindsayartsandletters to discuss reasonable terms).  The store also offers a small selection of lino prints, printed cards of lino prints, plus a small selection of other original artworks, although the plan is to add to this artwork collection in the coming months.

The in-store photographic collection is still being added to so does not yet fully reflect the range of images in the galleries here or posted on the Facebook pages, but everything should be harmonized within a month or so.