Unusual headgear

This is an old photo of mine but I thought I'd show it again as it has a bit of a story behind it. I saw this stag from a distance and could tell there was something wrong. Its antlers looked huge and the beast was walking with its head tilted to one side.

As I got closer I could see the lobster creels tangled in the antlers. The poor animal was struggling to move under the weight of them. If you look carefully you can just see a second lobster creel hanging by the deer's legs. I had no idea how long he'd been in this predicament but judging by the way the rope was twisted all around the tines he'd clearly been trying to thrash the darned things off for quite a while.

How had this stag ended up like this? Red deer are often seen on the shore where they lick the salt from rocks and graze on the rich grassland just above the foreshore. This stag just got too close to these washed up creels.

So what happened to the deer? It was clearly suffering and there was no way the creels were going to come loose. There was only one option: I had to tell the local deer stalker. The next morning he found the stag in the same spot and put it out of its misery. The upside of this story? More venison for the freezer.

Otter devours fish

Breakfast today was porridge and toast. My wife and baby boy had the same but the otter sitting on the shore about fifty yards from the house was munching away on a chunky fish. I ate breakfast quickly and wandered down to the shore. Luckily the sun had just popped up over Beinn Buidhe so the light was shining on the otter's wet fur. Lying on the seaweed I managed to get these shots. If anyone knows what kind of fish the otter is eating I'd love to know.

WildPhotos

I think it was half way through Sven Začek's talk at WildPhotos at the Royal Geographical Society that I felt the urge to get up and leave the theatre. His talk wasn't bad, it was inspiring and gave me an impulse to race outside, jump on the tube to Heathrow and fly to the boggy wilderness of Estonia.

His images of Ural owls - and the forests and bogland where they live - were extraordinary. I've never been to Estonia but through Sven's winter photos I could feel the cold and the crunch of the snow. And when the 450 photographers in the auditorium let out the day's biggest collective coo of delight at the image of the mother snuggled up on a branch next to its lone offspring I knew that this guy had a good eye for a photo. Here's another of his Ural owl shots on his website http://www.zacekfoto.ee/?pid=2371.

That was one of my highlights but Thomas Peschak risking drowning or a mauling by throwing himself into waterfall plunge pools, determined to get shots of a grizzly fishing for salmon, was another. And Andrew Parkinson's honest account of how he broke into the wildlife photography industry made me want to buy him a beer. He knew what he really wanted to do in life and went out and did it. And to hell with the financial consequences if it all went wrong. I felt a bit of empathy with him there.

It's impossible, and pointless, to pick a favourite image from the event but there are a few that kept popping into my head on the drive back to Knoydart: the Ural owls, Alex Badyaev's baby son staring at the bats hawking for moths outside the window, Andrew Parkinson's silhouetted coot looking like a creature from the Land Where the Jumblies Live and Jürgen Freund with a bad case of the runs hanging onto a car tyre, bobbing in the ocean. There was something for all tastes.

If you have even the most fleeting interest in wildlife photography I urge you to get a ticket for next year's event: not too many of you though, because I want a ticket too. www.wildphotos.org.uk

Note This is a review of the Friday session. Unfortunately I missed the Saturday because I had to get back to my hermit cell in the west Highlands.

Bushnell montage

Badgers, bats and otters, all caught on my Bushnell trophy cam (camera trap) within half a mile of my house. I've posted a few of these before but thought I'd stick them all together into a wee montage. Gave me an excuse to have a fiddle about in practice my editing skills.

Look out for the otter peeing on the lens in the first clip. I was going to put the badger defecating clip in but decided some of you might be having your lunch. If you really want to see it you'll find it on my vimeo page.

Otters everywhere

The otters in Knoydart are very active right now. We see them quite a lot on the shore in front of the house. Best times to see them seem to be on a falling tide.

There's a very active sprainting site just two minutes from my house. Spraint is otter poo, in case you were wondering. They use it to mark their territory and let other otters know that they have been passing. They tend to use the same prominent spots such as rocks just above the high water mark and grassy banks. The spraint acts as a natural fertiliser which causes the vegetation to grow much greener than the surrounding area. So it's very easy to find an active sprainting site.

I set my Bushnell camera trap up next to this one and got plenty of shots. This was the best of the bunch.

From Mallaig to Tarbet

Okay, I admit it, we didn't really walk from Mallaig, we got a taxi as far as Bracorina on the north shore of Loch Morar. We had a good excuse for cutting the walk short though; it was Games Day in Tarbet, that miniscule hamlet tucked in a bay on the south side of Loch Nevis, and we didn't want to miss it. From the end of the road at Bracorina it was only seven miles of peace and calm before an afternoon of jollity and mayhem in the back end of nowhere.

Showers chased us up the loch as we tramped along the well trodden path. This has been an ancient pathway for generations and the ruined chapel on the shore at Inbhir Beag told of a more populous time when folk would walk from miles around to pray. Tommy, my walking companion and ex-colleague in the Knoydart ranger service sighed and lamented the loss of a culture.

At Brinacory we passed four women swimming in the black waters of the loch - at 300 metres, the second deepest inland water in Europe and deepest in Britain. They had matching pink swimming caps on and black wetsuits and gave us a jolly wave as we passed. On the shore there was nothing, no bags, no clothes; it was as if they had appeared out of the loch. Perhaps they were looking for Morag the Monster. The tourist brochures will tell you that this beast lurks in the cold dark depths but there has been no Nessie effect here and, unlike Loch Ness, the loch is free of tourist coaches and souvenir shops.

The path rises above the loch to Sron Ghaothar ('Nose of the Goat') a rugged headland jutting into the loch and a great viewpoint. Down at the east end of the loch heavy sheets of rain were falling on the hills in great streaks like grey brushstrokes from the inky sky. It's wild country down there but I knew it well so I could picture what was round each corner of each hill. Sometimes it's better not to know, so that your imagination can wonder at the wild landscape that lies beyond. I think that's the explorer in me.

Our journey ended as we crossed the isthmus (what a great word - use it whenever you can) between Loch Morar and Loch Nevis and strolled down to Tarbet (the Gaelic for isthmus - even better!) and the Games. Like the Games in Knoydart these don't follow traditional lines. There's no Highland Fling or Hammer Throw but there was a horizontal bungee run, egg throwing and in place of the caber toss, the sheep toss (don't ask). As Tommy rightly said, a culture has been lost but on this part of the west coast a whole new one has been born.

Otter this morning

Was out leading a short wildlife photography walk this morning. Otters were hot on the wishlist so we drove along the shore road, parked and got out the binoculars. "There's one," I said. Easy as that.

As great as it was watching our lutrine friend fishing in the waves we didn't get a shot so here's one I took in roughly the same spot before - possibly the same otter. Also a couple of landscapes from the rest of our walk. The weather was a tad grim but we made the best of it.

Coast to Coast backwards

Back from updating Trailblazer's Coast to Coast guidebook. This will be the 5th edition. I did the 200 mile hike backwards. I didn't actually walk backwards but did the reverse to what everyone else does by walking from Robin Hood's Bay to St Bees. As everyone else tackling the walk is heading east I found myself having to say a lot of hellos around about lunchtime every day.

Weather was lousy but camped anyway. Tried to avoid the organised campsites and - even worse - the hideous caravan parks and found some great wild camp spots instead. Angle Tarn and Ennerdale Water in the Lakes were highlights.

Lowlight was a night with the lowlifes in Shap who turned the tiny campsite into an all night rave venue. I ended up packing up at three in the morning and re-pitching on the pavement next to the A-road. Pegs don't go easily into concrete so spent the rest of the night in a saggy bag of a tent in the rain and got woken up by lorries from the quarries thundering past at 5am. Camping in the hills the next night was a great antidote.

There are more pictures on my Facebook page.

Knoydart timelapse

Here's another timelapse of Knoydart, as seen from my garden. This is about an hour compressed into 17 seconds, shot on my Canon EOS 7D. You can see the lights of the metropolis of Inverie coming on as the light fades.

New image galleries

My new image gallery page is now live: http://jtm.photoshelter.com/

You can now download images or buy prints. There are galleries on wildlife, Scotland, hillwalking, the Himalayas and more. Feel free to let others know too!

Blue tits nesting

Well, this baby-rearing business is proving to be a great way of finding the local wildlife. First the bats and now blue tits. If it wasn't for my wee son demanding a cuddle with a view out of the window I wouldn't have been staring out into the garden for fifteen minutes and I wouldn't have spotted the blue tits flitting in and out of a natural hole in an old ash tree. So, I got the 400mm lens on it and managed to get a couple of shots. They're a bit grainy but it's a start.

Otter having a scratch

Knoydart gets a great summer, usually for about two weeks in May. This year it came at the end of April and so far May has been a washout. I had hoped to get out and film the otters but I've used the bad weather as an excuse to stay indoors and update my website. In the meantime I've had my Bushnell camera trap strapped to a tree by the otter holt down the road. Of about 30 clips over the last few days, this is the best.

Baby bat alarm

My wife and I have now had nearly five months of endless sleepless nights tending to a tiny new life. Every hour or so we're up to change nappies, do hot water bottles or feed the little tike (well, I don't do that bit).

A few nights ago, at about three in the morning, I was on my way to the kitchen to do yet another hot water bottle when something caught my eye through the front door window. Something small and dark had just flown through the moonlight into our porch. There were swallows nesting in there but it was way past their bed time. A quick look with a torch revealed a couple of brown long eared bats - never before recorded here in Knoydart. So I set my trusty camera trap up and got this short video.

We've now got about half a dozen bats using our porch every night as a resting up place during their night time midge hunts. I don't know how long they've been using it but if it wasn't for my baby son and his night time alarm calls I might never have known they were there.

Timelapse clouds over Ben Buidhe

I've been obsessed with timelapse ever since I got hold of an intervalometer. This little device allows me to take hundreds of pictures at set intervals (it does what it says on the tin). String all those images together and run them back and you get a speeded up view of the world. This is one of my first efforts, shot from my garden here in Knoydart - 26 minutes in 12 seconds. Expect more like this soon.

Getting intimate with otters

A few weeks ago I bought a Bushnell camera trap. Designed for hunters to track the movements of deer and game they are now becoming more and more popular with wildlife enthusiasts and film makers. Last year they appeared in the BBC's Lost Land of the Tiger in which wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan successfully filmed tigers at high altitude in Bhutan. More on that here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8998000/8998042.stm

Well, the species in this clip may not be quite as rare as a tiger and the location may not be quite as exotic as the Kingdom of Bhutan but here in the wilds of Knoydart my camera trap has picked up some pretty good shots of otters on the shore near my house.

After five and a bit years as one half of the ranger service in Knoydart, at the end of March I am leaving the job in the capable hands of Tommy and going it alone as a freelance photographer and writer. It's not a new thing for me; I've been writing guidebooks for ten years now and taking photographs for as long as I can remember. So, it's about time, I thought, to take the plunge and put all my energy into words and pictures. First job is some proofreading for Trailblazer and wedding photography this weekend. And a little wildlife photography and filming too.

New blog

Just fiddling about with this new blog and a Facebook page. Hope to get it all up and running as soon as possible. One step at a time...