{"id":1152,"date":"2008-06-07T22:06:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-07T21:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1152"},"modified":"2013-11-20T20:46:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T20:46:39","slug":"woods-mill-nature-reserve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/woods-mill-nature-reserve\/","title":{"rendered":"Woods Mill Nature Reserve"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

We made a trip out today to Woods Mill Nature Reserve, the headquarters of the Sussex Wildlife Trust<\/a>. It's a small, accessible reserve (with strong educational features), and boasts a wonderfully rich habitat. Well worth a visit if you're in Sussex. And take a camera!<\/p>\n

Here are a few of today's highlights. I'll start with the Beautiful Demoiselle, one of the most elegant of the damselflies. I saw my first one of these about a week ago at work and had no idea what it was. Woods Mill, changed that. They were present in large numbers, and busy doing what all dragonflies do at this time of year.<\/p>\n

Beautiful Demoiselle damselfly (male)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The female has brown wings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Those don't really do justice to the way they move, which is rather like butterflies, a fluttering light movement quite unlike the broad bodied chasers I photograph at work. Another graceful flyer is the heron, and we were lucky enough to see one glide in and settle in a tree beside the lake.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Among the other birds we saw were some warblers, a jay flying perfectly across open sky (but I was too slow to capture the moment), as well as various tits and other native birds. They have kingfishers there as well, but we were out of luck today. The biggest surprise though wasn't in the air, nor in the water. It was on the path as we were walking through a wooded area. Now I've seen this creature before, but never in the wild. And although not slow, I did have the camera ready.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I've since checked and confirmed that it's a grass snake (non venomous). It was probably a shade over 3 foot long, and glided serenely into the undergrowth.<\/p>\n

More photos from today in the Woods Mill Nature Reserve<\/a> album on my main site.<\/p>\n

I was going to leave today's post at that, but I got one shot in the garden that I have to post (it's in the new June Birds<\/a> album) and is one in an irregular series of 'fluffy birds'.<\/p>\n

Fluffy Wren<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Camera note: the demoiselles were taken with the Sigma 105mm F2.8 EX DG macro and Canon 430EX flash unit. The rest of the shots today were with the EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.<\/i> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[980,309,427],"tags":[33,1148,1178,426],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds-2","category-damselfly","category-snake","tag-birds","tag-dragonfly","tag-snake","tag-woods-mill","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}