Everything is Permuted

Well it's the season of the fox. No doubt about that as all. As well as Shutterbug being an almost permanent fixture, the cubs (or at least two of them) have learnt to tolerate sharing the garden and are proving excellent, and very cute, guests. They are probably around 10-12 weeks old, and increasingly independent (though not entirely as the first of two video at the end will show).

These first three shots were taken on Saturday evening, after heavy rain. Hence the somewhat waterlogged state of the cubs. This is the bolder of the pair.


And this is the more cautious sibling.


And here they are together.


These next images are hot off the press, taken just a few minutes ago.








Now for some video, beginning with Mama Vixen coping with the cubs.


The second video is the moving image version of yesterday's blog... the sleeping fox. Nothing much at all happens, and what you see is a couple of minutes culled from a 40 minute snooze!



Camera note: the first three shots and the second video were taken with the Canon 7D and EF70-300mm 4.5-5.6 DO IS lens. The last four photos were taken with the EF 100mm f/2.8L macro IS USM lens. The trail cam footage is by the Bushnell Trophy Cam.

I''m going to start today's post with a couple of shots left over from yesterday, including these house martins which were busy gathering mud for nests.


And from the latter end of yesterday a shot of a fulmar squeezing itself into a hollow in the cliffs at Rottingdean.


The young moorhens were out again this morning. They are such wonderfully bizarre little things that I can never quite believe they are real. They seem to be doing well enough though, and they have two doting parents to look after them.




The big sighting of the day came as I was leaving work to the sound of a very loud housemartin.


If that picture has left you bemused (and I can see why it might), then I should explain. The boxes (presumably full of gig merchandise) are inside the Falmer Stadium which is hosting the Fatboy Slim 'Big Beach Boutique' gig (FbS aka Norman Cook, one time member of the Housmartins). That was convoluted to say the least, but anyway the music was starting up as I was leaving work. In fact it had been going for a while, but by 5.00pm the volume was beginning to increase. The usual squadron of gulls that circles overhead at just about every time of day were absent. I thought maybe the music had driven them away, but a second scan of the skies suggested that their absence was for a quite different reason.

Gliding in at a relatively modest altitude was the unmistakeable shape of a red kite. Maybe it was attracted by the 120bpm music (maybe not) but it was by some way the closest encounter I've had with a red kite over the Sussex Downs. The shots aren't great (poor light and they were grabbed very rapidly), but I'm not going to not post them





Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 7D and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.