Seaton Cliffs

A couple of weeks ago, I headed up to the red sandstone coastline of the Scottish Wildlife Trust's Seaton Cliffs wildlife reserve. The reserve sits on the east coast of Scotland, just at the town of Arbroath. That's not a million miles away from the big seabird colonies at the Isle of May, Bass Rock and the Farne Islands and I was keen to see if there were any seabirds nesting along the cliffs since it would certainly be an easier (and cheaper) spot to get to than the islands of a weekend!

Wildflowers on the Seaton Cliffs with Arbroath in the distance.

Seaton Cliffs Wildlife Reserve. Link to Google Maps.

Almost as soon as we arrived at the reserve I realised that I'd left the battery for my DSLR in the charger at home which was... less than ideal! This led to the subsequent realisation that there is nowhere obvious in Arbroath to buy a battery for a Canon 7D. Fortunately, I had my trusty Canon G12 tucked away in my rucksack as well though, which turned out to be absolutely fine for the wildflowers and lovely scenery.

The red sandstone Seaton Cliffs.

A couple of snoozing gulls was the only bird life we saw on the cliffs for the first half an hour or so. We did walk VERY slowly though! 

Sauntering along the path from the car park in Arbroath, we were treated to lovely views of the cliffs and views over the North Sea, but not much in the way of birds. There were plenty of wildflowers though and lots of little white butterflies in amongst them which were lovely (but too skittish for my compact camera), as well as skylarks in the fields on the other side of the path.

A sandstone arch carved out by the sea.

My old dog certainly enjoyed the walk!

The cliffs themselves have been weathered into all kinds of shapes and structures, and it looked like an outdoor-adventure group were setting up ropes along some areas, presumably for a spot of cliff-walking or something similar. The walk was also clearly popular with dog-owners, so if you're looking for a more solitary experience, this might not be the place for you! Then again, it was also a beautifully sunny day when I visited which might have boosted the numbers a bit.

Kittiwakes and gulls nesting on Seaton cliffs. A couple of guillemots and shags were also present on the rocks by the shore, but may just have been passing through.

A northern fulmar (Fulmaris glacialis) on the cliffs.

Eventually, we did find a small bay which had quite a few kittiwakes, gulls and fulmars nesting on them, as well as a couple of guillemots and shags further down by the water. It wasn't a huge number of birds, but the cliffs were obviously protected enough from predators and the elements that it was good enough for some at least! If you're just looking for a few birds, this was a nice wee spot to see them, but it was nothing like as crowded with animals as the big island colonies, and there were definitely no puffins.

Cormorants, eider ducks and oystercatchers were happy to hang out in the bay next to the car park.

By the time we got back to the car, the tide had come in and there were a few more birds hanging out on the rocks just opposite the car park including a few cormorants, eider ducks and oystercatchers which was pretty cool. Later in the season it might be worth swinging by to have a look out for eider ducklings!

My Best Friend's Wedding

This weekend I got the chance to do something a little different (for me anyway), and swap my wildlife subjects for wedding guests! Michelle (who's been my best friend for a very long time!) got married to her husband Steven in Mauritius last year, which is a rather lovely venue for a wedding, but one that not many of us were able to get to. Since I was deeply mired in the horrors of thesis writing at that point, I was one of the people who couldn't make it along.

Not everyone was quite so engrossed in the ceremony! (Photo by Kevin Boyle).

Waiting to cut the (rather delicious) cake

The bride's speech

Fortunately part two of the wedding celebrations was planned for last weekend at Dalduff Farm in Ayrshire which was much closer to home! Since I knew that they weren't planning to have a photographer at this celebration, I offered to bring my kit with me on the understanding that this was my first shot at photographing an actual wedding and there were no guarantees of success!

Michelle and Steven, the lovely bride and groom!

And the lovely bridesmaids!

Happily, we got a stunningly beautiful day for it all, and the photos turned out pretty well I think. It was also a lot easier and a lot more fun than I was expecting it to be, but I guess it helps when you know half the room!

Every wedding should end with a ceilidh. Always.

So there we go - my first wedding as a photographer (sort-of)! Congratulations again to Michelle and Steven, and I promise I'll be back to the wildlife updates and wellies with the next blog! 

Troon Beaches & Harbour

Troon is a small town in Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, and is one of the places I try and get to with my camera at least two or three times a year. Aside from being conveniently close to Glasgow for a day trip, it is has a really varied coastline which makes it a great spot for photographing coastal birds.

Troon's beaches are conveniently close to Glasgow and Ayr.

Birds on the Beaches

A windy day at one of Troon's beaches

The beaches around Troon are mainly sandy with smaller patches of bedrock. This combination of habitats means that you get a really nice mix of different birds along the coast. The sandy areas are used as feeding grounds by wading birds like curlew, oystercatchers and dunlin, while smaller species like plovers, redshank and turnstones can be spotted feeding in the seaweeds around the rocky areas.

Redshank are a common sight on the rockier places

Turnstones are also quite easy to find!

This pair of Dunlin were too busy foraging around the edges of a freshwater stream to worry about me an my camera.

These beaches are really popular with local dog walkers (for good reason!), so do bear that in mind before you head down. Most folk tend to stay towards the upper parts of the beach, but there's so much space there's plenty of room for everyone. It also means that most of the wildlife here is quite used to humans, and although they won't tend to let you walk right up to them, they are a bit more tolerant of disturbances than in other places and will settle down again fairly quickly.

The beaches are popular with dog walkers too

Obviously, that doesn't mean you get a free pass to cause a disturbance to the wildlife yourself! They are still wild animals, and it is our job as photographers and wildlife-watchers to make sure that we respect that and don't disturb them. As a general rule of thumb, you can tell quite easily when an animal has noticed you: that's a good time to stop approaching them.

Seascapes

The views over to Arran are gorgeous on nice days...

The views from Troon look out over to the Isle of Arran, which can provide a really nice backdrop for any seascapes you might want to try. Also, when the weather turns, it's quite easy to find cool bits of coastline close to the road, so you can get some stormy shots of the sea without having to stray too far from shelter!

... And really cool on the stormy days!

Troon Harbour 

Gulls annoying a grey seal.

While you're here, it's worth remembering that Troon has a working harbour that is used by a decent number of fishing boats that fish the Clyde for Langoustines, and where there are fishing boats, there are usually grey seals!

Eider ducks in the harbour at Troon.

Troon harbour is also a surprisingly good place for Eider Ducks, and there seems to be a large population of the birds living in and around the harbour! Unless you're able to visit a breeding colony (like the Farne Islands for example), I've always found eiders particularly difficult to approach, so the group at Troon was pretty exciting to find!

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Like this? Why not check out some of my other Location Guides.

You can see these and many more of my photos over in the Wild Ocean Photography galleries

Glencoe at Speed

Last weekend, conditions in the Scottish mountains were pretty perfect so I headed up to the Nevis range with Kev for a day on the snowboard. From Glasgow, this means about a 3 hour drive up to Fort William via Glencoe and the stunningly beautiful Rannoch Moor. Due to a dead battery in the car, we ended up leaving home a bit later than intended which meant we ended up driving through Rannoch Moor just as the sun was setting behind the mountains with some absolutely stunning lighting.

We stopped in a couple of places to enjoy the snow and the view en route, but unfortunately couldn't stop the car in the moor itself. So, while Kev was driving, I attempted some out-the-window-at-60-mph shots. They're nothing like as nice as you would get from doing this properly, but sometimes the view is just too good to pass up and some of them didn't come out too badly!

Rannoch Moor in the snow at speed!
Click for a larger version.

It was probably one of the most stunning evenings to be in the mountains. Click for a larger version.

The boarding up Nevis was also beautiful, but since it was my first trip up a mountain in a year I elected to leave my DSLR in the car which only left me with my phone to try and do the view any justice at all. And it's got a really crap camera, but you get the idea!

Looking down on Fort William, Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe.
Click for a larger version.

Snow!!
Click for a larger version.

Coming back home we were a little early for the sunset, but thanks to the hordes of people who decided to park on the A82 to use the Glencoe ski resort (yes, it's a 60mph single carriageway; yes parking on it is stupidly dangerous and illegal. Sigh.) we got held up there by the police traffic control for just long enough for the light to get just a little bit better. This time around the view wasn't quite as nice up on the top of the moor, but we found a wee bit to stop at overlooking a frozen lochan which was just stunning and worth getting my shoes full of snow for!

Tracks leading up to a frozen lochan in Rannoch Moor
Click for a larger version.

It's nice to be outside again!

Photos from Inverary

I'm back! If you're wondering where I've been, read on. If you just want to see some photos from Inverary, you can skip most of this and head straight down to the images!

So if you've been following this blog at all, you've probably noticed that things here have somewhat ground to a halt over the last three months and I have to admit it's entirely PhD-related. I'm coming up to the end of my 3rd year just now, and courtesy of a (really important) conference in June followed by two months working flat-out in an attempt to meet a self-imposed, unrealistic and unnecessary deadline, my stress levels have been creeping progressively higher for a while now. It's been more or less entirely self-inflicted too, but it's meant that I've not been going out to do the things that I find relaxing (like photography) because I've been feeling too guilty about not working. But then the stress gets higher and your work gets worse and all in all, it's a pretty bad place to be. It's fine when it's short-term, but not so great in the long run. I'm sure pretty much everyone has been there at some point.

Last week got to the point where the workplan clearly wasn't working, so I binned my deadline and went back to working the way that works for me (no Gannt charts!) and instantly felt better. This was also pretty much the point I noticed how crap the last 2-3 months have been, and when I also learned that if I don't want to go out with my camera to photograph wild things because of work, I'm probably working too much!

Anyway, this weekend I got the camera back out for wildlife for the first time since my last research cruise in April(!) and we headed up to Inverary (west coast of Scotland) for a day out with the dog. Since it was an an unusually sunny day the town was pretty busy, but there were still a few birds rummaging around the flats at low water when the dog wasn't charging around! I didn't get anything amazing, but here are a few of the better shots:

There were a LOT of jackdaws on the beach, which is a little unusual - most of the times I've been up that way it's been hooded crows everywhere.

These two had a brief fight over a patch of seaweed, which was over in about 5 seconds!

The bright sun didn't make for ideal shooting conditions without a polariser, but allowed for some nice silhouette shots. These are three redshanks and an oystercatcher feeding below the tide line.

Redshanks feeding along the shore.

Until the dog couldn't wait any longer to play in the sea and came to see what I was doing!

Most of the trips our dog gets to the seaside happen when I'm out to take photographs, so it was a pretty awesome day out for him too! Sonny's a rescue dog from the cat & dog home in Glasgow and can be pretty reactive around other dogs, so finding a quiet spot to let him off the lead and play is great!

Sonny

Of course, if I'm taking photos I'm not the one who has to dog-sit. I'm not sure if Kevin had quite as good a day as Sonny and I did!

Heading home via the Loch Fyne brewery, we spotted this small herd of red deer on the hillside too.

So that was our trip out! I'm fully intending to do this more often from now on, so with a bit of luck the blog posts will pick back up again over the next few weeks. Until then, don't forget you can keep up to date with my news and various happenings in the marine world via my facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/wildoceanphotography.

Dive Guide: 5th Layby on the Left (Loch Creran)

Site Summary

I don’t know if this site has a real name, but this one is at least descriptive! From the one entrance point you have the choice of diving one of three shallow rocky reefs, all of which are at depths of around 3m - 25m. The off-reef areas are ideal for training on a sandy seafloor, but the real attractions here are the serpulid worms which form beautiful, fragile reefs with their calcareous tubes. For some reason (no-one knows why), this loch is the only site in the world where these worms form large reefs like this and they are well worth seeing.

Type: Shore dive (rocky reef / serpulid reefs)

Depth: 3m-25m 

Tides: None

Suitable for: All diver grades (but good buoyancy essential near serpulid reefs)

Getting there and getting in

From Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

5th Layby on the left site access.

To get to this site, drive north along the A828 towards Fort William, past the Sealife Centre, then turn left at the next roundabout and go under the bridge at the north of Loch Creran. From there (believe it or not!), it’s the 5th passing place on the left. There’s a large parking space there which can fit 4-5 cars. 

Site Access

From the parking bay,  you'll see a path and steps leading down to the shore. It can get a bit slippery underfoot when it's wet or icy so watch out, but basically you just walk straight down the beach and wade in!

Underwater

You have a couple of options for your dives at this site. See below for details. 

Approximate map of the 5th Layby dive site. Click to enlarge.

Once under the water, you have a few choices to make. 

Option 1: If you head straight out from the shore, you'll swim over a sandy seabed to a depth of around 6m where you'll find a small rocky reef. It slopes down quite steeply to a depth of around 10m and at some point someone has tried to build an artificial reef out of old tyres, so you should find those pretty easily. It's a pretty small area though, so you should see most of it within about 20-30 minutes depending on how thoroughly you explore!

Option 2: Keep the line of rocks on your left and follow them out into the water. As you drop down, you'll see a stretch of bedrock on your left which is covered in mussels and horse mussels. Then just keep this rock face on your left and follow it round to about 12-15m. At that point, you'll come to a bend in the rock and you have two more choices: Either follow the rock round to the left a little then double-back over the top of the bedrock slope (option 2a), or head to the right and explore the boulders further out (option 2b).

Option 2a: Head back up and over the bedrock to a depth of about 6m and then search around and you should find a large serpulid reef (approximately 1m high) which is well worth a look, as well as some smaller colonies. They are extremely fragile though, so do not touch them and do NOT swim over them! From there, continue onwards and you'll get back to your entry point.

Option 2b: This is a route I've only ever taken once, so I don't know it as well as the others. But, if you head out towards the right away from the bedrock slope, you'll find yourself in a boulder field which has some nice life on it. Just retrace your steps to get back or follow Option 2a.

Whichever option you choose, you may find you run into a bit of current once you get past the end of the bedrock slope, but it never gets very strong here and you can swim against it quite easily.

Recommended Equipment

Torch

What to See

The serpulid worm reefs are really the main attraction here, but there is a LOT of life on these reefs and they are lovely dives even if you miss the worms. There is a lot of encrusting life over the rock surfaces including plumose anemones, cup corals, Sagartiogeton sp., crabs, fan worms, soft corals and sponges. There’s not usually a lot in the way of fish life, although I’ve seen thornback rays here and quite a few pipefish. In the shallows there are large stands of Ascophylllum seaweeds and horse mussel beds to investigate too which usually have loads of little animals living in amongst them.

Visibility is usually fairly good, but varies a great deal depending on prevailing weather conditions and tide. If you dive here after a period of heavy rain and on an ebb tide the visibility can drop to almost nothing.

On the surface it's pretty common to see seals and otters here too so keep an eye out for those!

Serpulid worm reef at Loch Creran

Greater Pipefish

Close-up of a serpulid worm. The trumpet-shaped operculum is a defining character of this family of worms.

Looking for more? Check out the Dive Guides page!

It's nice to be home!

The first thing I did on return to Glasgow after reminding the dog I still exist. Good times!

Nothing sums up coming home to Scotland quite like a bottle of Irn Bru and a Greggs!

Anyway, as some of you may have noticed I've been using some time over the last few days to update the layout of the blog a little bit and have added in a drop-down menu system. Since I'm not a programmer and this was a task requiring a spot of CSS coding, I turned to the ever-helpful Google to sort it out and would like to acknowledge this guide as the reason I got anything to work at all.

With that done, I've been able to align the blog a bit better to the layout used over at my Wild Ocean Photography site, and intend to use it to set up quick links through to some of the location & equipment guides I have planned. For now though, I've set up a 'Kit Bag' section so now you can find out what gear I use when I'm out photographing, SCUBA diving or boating if you're feeling nosy! 

I've also uploaded the first set of images from the Changing Oceans 2012 research cruise (JC073) to the Marine Science and Conservation gallery over at Wild Ocean Photography so you can go and check those out now too!