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| Blue Fulmar (type D), Bempton Cliffs, a full decade ago.... |
Consider this the result of two minor new year's resolutions - to sort through the unedited virtual dung-heap of my digital photos, and to make more of an effort to update this here online bird and wildlife journal. Of the former, I've made some headway during long train journeys over the last few weeks (with my Filey photos - which constitute the majority - now largely culled and filed), and of the latter, well it occurred to me this morning that I've now been blogging here for exactly ten years.
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| Blue Fulmar (type L), Filey, February 2017 |
Ten years?! Yep, a full decade of what has been a happy place to record, principally for my own benefit, my wildlife adventures, however far-flung or local, exotic or mundane - effectively my online, chronological notebook. I'm no fancy photographer with fancy gear - on the contrary, trust me - but it being a visual medium, photos have always been important, and I've had a lot of enjoyment in the field thanks to the camera over those ten years.
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| Blue Fulmar (type L), Filey, February 2017 |
So, what better way to start than with the very first bird I (purposely) photographed, and the first bird to appear on the blog, a full decade ago? At the time the bird in question (first photo) was an unexpected bonus on a trip back home (from my other, adopted hometown of London) to Bempton Cliffs in the dead of winter; over the course of recent years, it's come to represent a scarce but somewhat more attainable presence during one of my favourite types of birding up here on the Yorkshire coast - seawatching.
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| Fulmar (type LL), Filey, February 2017 |
So we kick off with the blue (dark) morph of Northern / Atlantic Fulmar - a 'special' plumage of a special bird - which, to generalise, are birds from (usually) more northerly climes. The top bird is likely from a colony far up in the Arctic circle, while the bird in photos 2 and 3 is more of an intermediate; the bird in the fourth photo (above), taken within a minute of the one above it, is a 'regular' Fulmar, i.e. as we would expect to see one here in the southern North Sea.
Alright, let's see how long I can keep this up....
