{"id":1662,"date":"2010-06-28T00:06:02","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T23:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1662"},"modified":"2013-11-10T19:19:48","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T19:19:48","slug":"animals-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/animals-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Animals in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

One of the joys of wildlife watching is seeing the extraordinary abilities of even the most commonplace creature, from gulls coming into land to butterflies navigating from flower to flower in the breeze. There's the aerial grace of the swift, the climbing ability of the fox, the gymnastic excellence of the squirrel. And then there's the May Bug (cockchafer). In case you haven't come across this large flying bug, it is usually active in June or July (despite the name). It's among the clumsiest of all flying creatures (these are the ones that bump into you), aimless in direction and near hopeless at achieving a straight path. Plus, as I discovered today, they are useless at climbing. I came across this one out in the garden.
<\/span> Walking (it's quite good at this)<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> Winged flight remained a vain hope today<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> How about a climb?<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> Progress of sorts…<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> No! Can't quite manage it \ud83d\ude41 <\/span><\/p>\n

It eventually crawled off to shelter under a flower pot.<\/p>\n

One of the garden favourites is the blackbird whose distinctive song dominates the later afternoon. Unlike the May bug, they fly like arrows between sentry posts, fast, straight and low. I would hate to get in the way of one!
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I've spent a long time waiting to catch a sequence of a blackbird, but not as long as I've been after the next shot. This is the true 'fox trot', a form of play combat that establishes dominance without undue harm to either fox. The young male is on the left in this short sequence.
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<\/span>
\"Nature<\/a><\/span>
Camera note: all shots were taken with the Canon 40D. lenses as follows: May bug, Sigma 105mm F2.8 EX DG macro; blackbird, EF 400mm f\/5.6L USM; foxes, EF 24-105 F4L IS USM.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,980,4,991],"tags":[51,1142,1128,637,636],"class_list":["post-1662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behaviour","category-birds-2","category-foxes","category-insects-2","tag-blackbird","tag-cub","tag-fox","tag-fox-trot","tag-may-bug","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}