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.