What better picture could there be to summarise the Summer of 2025 than a Fox sunbathing on top of a bale of hay?
The sun was just setting when I drove past the field and I could not resist a few photos of this lazy Fox. Harder times are just around the corner!
This weeks photo typifies our last summer – one of fields full of thistles and Goldfinches. More than
one hundred Goldfinches are in the photo devouring the seeds of thistles.
At the end of this year it will be fifty years since the long hot summer of 1976. It was a year that I will never forget having caught and ringed more than a thousand Greenfinches within one mile of my home in Castleton- How times have changed!
If you are wondering where all the Jays have gone from your garden then you only need to walk to the nearest Oak wood. Following the recent high winds the ground is now covered in the largest fall of Acorns I have ever seen. It may be some time before you see a Jay in your garden again.
www.facebook.com/gordonyateswildlife
During the last ten years I have spent many hours in my hide filming female Hen Harriers returning to their nests with prey that the male has just provided in a mid-air pass. It is part of a fifty year project on the prey of Hen Harriers that I have been working on.
As the female Harrier leaves the nest after the feed I have occasionally taken a photo of her and thought nothing more of it. However, just recently I noticed that she regularly had something in her bill. Upon enlarging the photo I realised that she was in fact removing from the nest pellets that the young had regurgitated after their feed. – something that I believe has rarely been filmed before.
www.facebook.com/gordonyateswildlife
For more than fifty years I have spent many days searching the Hebrides for Golden Eagles to film under the appropriate Licence. I have found many eyries but none as spectacular as this weeks blog photo – the female Eagle is incubating eggs in an eyrie on a sea-cliff and is surrounded by Red Campion and Roseroot – can it get any better than that?
www.facebook.com/gordonyateswildlife
The warm and sunny summer has been the bonus that our butterflies have been waiting a long time for. Our garden sunflower has recently attracted Red Admirals with the local Golf course providing home to an incredible 260 Ringlets in August. Better still were 6 Wall Browns sunning themselves by the edge of a moorland reservoir.
www.facebook.com/gordonyateswildlife