Feline

Amur Leopard (Female), originally uploaded by andyskelton-a Blog a day http://andrewskelton.net.

Good evening, a late blog today; the UK has moved to British Summer Time today, with the clocks having been put forward by an hour. This is going to make photography on an evening possible and I’ve already planned where I’ll be for the next couple of days. There are some lakes (different to the other lakes where I took the photos of the swan, mallard and cormorant, and nothing at all to do with The Lakes) about 30 minutes away from where I live that I’ve been to many times and where I visited today.

They play host to many summer migrants, on today’s tick lists were Chiffchaff, blackcaps, tufted duck, shovellers, long tailed tits, goldfinch to name but a few but the highlight for me was the little egret. Not uncommon in the UK these days, I did however have fun photographing them despite being a bit too far away from them to get the type of shot I prefer. However I practised my BIF (or Bird In Flight for those non bird/photographer) and I also produced a nice little movie which I will be uploading to Flickr in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Today’s image was of the female leopard taken at Marwell a week ago, and which I’d written about before. Perched on a tree, I had little chance to take the image I wanted to get, as she kept laying down over the log facing away from me. I would have preferred the soft winter sun to be shining on her directly to make the rich effervescent colours in her coat sparkle but I can’t really complain after taking this photo.

Today’s blog title? It’s the title of album but another of my favourite Punk bands, though the album itself it’s what you’d call punk. The band are, The Stranglers, and contain the singles Midnight Summer Dream, and The European Female. It was released after their biggest hit, Golden Brown (who’s theme is not what you’d expect of such a mellow song), and has a much softer sound to their earlier work. I’m not sure the Stranglers should have ever been labelled punk, they were and are far too musical compared to the rest of their genre and they’re one of the few that are still played on the radio, some 35 years later! In fact some of their songs are probably as relevant now as they were then, with the discontent in the UK and marches to protest at the cut’s today’s song is highly appropriate “Something Better Change” , though I guess I could have quoted the Sex Pistols “Anarchy in the UK“!

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