Anyone who has followed our blog for some time will be very familiar with the important role that Otters have played in the development of NEWT over the last 18 years. Jessica Aldred’s article in the Guardian took our website from one or two visitors a day to 600 or more, and the number of enquiries we get about trips to look for Otters is about the same as enquiries about pelagic trips and dolphin spotting :-). Although COVID precipitated a change from us providing transport and food, and safari days lasting up to 10 hours, to our current half-day model where we have a pre-arranged meeting point and we walk (and occasionally drive in convoy) from there, Otters and the search for them has remained a constant throughout. We’ll be adding otter mini-safari dates for 2027 to our calendar in the next couple of months, but we’ve already taken bookings for May and September next year!
They’re wild animals and (generally) unpredictable, but there’s always lots of other wildlife to watch while we’re searching for them and sometimes they can even be overshadowed by other species (usually Barn Owl…) in the rich flora and fauna of Northumberland.
Eurasian River Otter (Lutra lutra), Northumberland (C) Northern Experience ImagesEurasian River Otter (Lutra lutra), Northumberland (C) Northern Experience ImagesEurasian River Otter (Lutra lutra), Northumberland (C) Northern Experience ImagesEurasian River Otter (Lutra lutra), Northumberland (C) Northern Experience ImagesEurasian River Otter (Lutra lutra), Northumberland (C) Northern Experience Images
I’ve never really been a morning person, but the limited colour palette of a hazy sunrise on the East coast is always an incentive.
I was already using a long enough exposure to blur the incoming waves, but then a little bit of intentional camera movement changed things completely. The waves transformed from motion-blurred to brushstrokes, and a ghosted image of the fishing boat on the horizon as it approached the reflection of the Sun balanced the luminosity of the left hand side of the frame.
That horizon right across the middle of the image? Rules are meant to be bent and broken…
A lot of my photography needs to be as sharp and realistic as possible; dolphin photo-ID and kittiwake colony counts both require technical precision, and accurate depiction of the subject, and they’ve filled a lot of memory card space over the last few years.
For a long time, most of my landscape photography was similarly precise. Mainly black and white, although I love the colours of sunset and sunrise, often contrasty, but usually identifiable to location and with an obvious subject.
That started to change 7 years ago. I was leading a photography holiday on the Northumberland coast and all of the guests had said they wanted to be out very early the next morning to photograph the sunrise. Surprisingly, or not, I was the only one who actually headed to the beach at 5am so it was just me, my camera, an occasional dog-walker, and sublime light just before sunrise. I was hand-holding, with exposures of up to 5s, so knew that there would be some camera movement. I’ve always had an obsession with capturing the movement of water, but the ethereal painterly feel of images taken with several seconds of exposure and without the safety net of a tripod anchoring familiar shapes in the frame was something I’d never attempted.
Alnmouth beach, Northumberland, 19/04/19 (c)Northern Experience ImagesAlnmouth beach, Northumberland, 19/04/19 (c)Northern Experience ImagesAlnmouth beach, Northumberland, 19/04/19 (c)Northern Experience ImagesAlnmouth beach, Northumberland, 19/04/19 (c)Northern Experience ImagesAlnmouth beach, Northumberland, 19/04/19 (c)Northern Experience Images
In future posts I’ll share the development of my own landscape photography over the last few years, as well as techniques, and thoughts about veering away from realism…
After a few late withdrawals, due to the alternative evening entertainment from Atlanta, we still managed to sail with a full boat. There had been a sighting of dolphins breaching out near the Tyne Anchorage, and at this time of year that would almost certainly mean White-beaked Dolphins! Heading along the Tyne, under leaden skies, we had an update…”There are dolphins just north of the piers now, I’m sure they’re White-beaks”.
As we left the river and scanned along King Eddie’s Bay and Longsands, there were ten or so White-beaks well dispersed and quietly feeding. One or two had a quick look at us before heading back towards the shore, and we drifted well away from them. We decided to head slowly southwards, and passed the dolphins who were now either side of the mouth of the Tyne. As we picked up speed they started chasing us down and then we had them bow-riding to Souter Lighthouse, where we also had brief views of three Harbour Porpoises 🙂
White-beaked Dolphin [Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off Souter, South Tyneside, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesWhite-beaked Dolphin {Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off Souter, South Tyneside, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesWhite-beaked Dolphin [Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off Souter, South Tyneside, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience Images
Suddenly, they all vanished. Our final sighting was one animal that had been bow-riding for ten minutes then disappeared with a vertical dive into the inky darkness below, just as someone spotted dolphins close to shore below the lighthouse. I lifted my binoculars and was surprised to see Bottlenose Dolphins heading south! We drifted for a few minutes without any further sign of them, then continued steadily towards Roker, where we were joined by six bow-riding Bottlenose 🙂
Bottlenose Dolphin [Tursiops truncatus], off Roker, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesBottlenose Dolphin [Tursiops truncatus], off Roker, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesBottlenose Dolphin [Tursiops truncatus], off Roker, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesBottlenose Dolphin [Tursiops truncatus], off Roker, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesBottlenose Dolphin [Tursiops truncatus], off Roker, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience Images
They eventually departed when we were off Hendon, and it was time for us to start heading back towards the Tyne. As we approached Marsden Rock another Harbour Porpoise was typically undemonstrative as it slowly surfaced, then the White-beaked Dolphins reappeared 🙂 The group included at least three mother/calf pairs, with one of the calves so small that it was possibly only a few days old! There was more bow-riding, in failing light and a deepening swell, and dolphins were still widely dispersed off South Shields as we made our way through the piers. Other than sailing along the Tyne, there were probably only 20 minutes during the entire evening where we didn’t have dolphins in view!
White-beaked Dolphin [Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off South Shields, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesWhite-beaked Dolphin [Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off South Shields, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience ImagesWhite-beaked Dolphin [Lagenorhynchus albirostris], off South Shields, 15/07/26 (c)Northern Experience Images
Most of our pelagic trips for the remainder of this year are already full, but we’ve just added some 4hr daytime sailings in September www.newtltd.co.uk/calendar. Bookings went live on Monday and they’re filling quickly, with only September 25th 09:00 having more than three spaces still available, so if you’d like to join us on the final day of Martin’s 30th season organising pelagic trips off the NE coast book soon!
I ‘phoned Helen on Monday morning to check that everything was still ok for the evenings excursion searching for Otters. It was raining quite hard, and visibility wasn’t great, but with her brother and sister visiting, to celebrate her 60th birthday, Monday was the only realistic option…
Luckily it wasn’t windy, as that’s the weather condition where we’ve always had a much harder job finding Otters, and the rain had eased when we met at the car park at Church Point in Newbiggin by the Sea. I’d seen an Otter three times in the last week on the River Wansbeck and we walked along the river from the estuary to the location of my most recent sighting, which had been on Saturday morning.
Cormorants were roosting on a small island, Canada Geese were calling noisily, and a drake Mallard slowly heading along the water’s edge in the shadow of the bushes on the opposite side of the river attracted our attention a couple of times. Stonechats were flying back and forth between the riverside hawthorns and, as the rain stopped, the river was nearly mirror flat. An “ooh” then an “ahh” from Helen focused everyone’s attention on the water less than halfway across the river…and up popped an Otter!
When one of our clients really wants to see an Otter in the wild it’s always a joy for us to help them do that, and when it’s within a few miles of their home it’s even better 🙂 After more than an hour of the Otter feeding, vanishing for a few minutes, reappearing and then eventually disappearing into the gloom, we headed out to the coast where Grey Heron, Moorhen and Coot were making their way along the edges of reedbeds, the disembodied tittering call of a Little Grebe came from beyond the constantly encroaching limit of visibility and a Marsh Harrier made a close pass as the rain intensified.
Not sure where the time went, but I just realised it’s nearly two years since I wrote a blog post!
For the last couple of years our NEWT-related activities have mainly been based around our pelagic season between May and September, delivering events at the Battlesteads Observatory, and still dealing with the backlog of bookings created by the 2020/2021 lockdowns. Although we haven’t been scheduling tours, we’ve still been delivering them regularly, and we’re thinking about how we add scheduled tours to our calendar again 🙂 We’re actually down to the final three trips still remaining to be delivered after delays due to COVID – both ours and our clients – and poor weather.
As well as NEWT events, I’ve been leading holidays for two other tour operators and spending May-September since 2021 studying Kittiwakes for Shoney Wind as part of the team behind the new ‘Kittiwakery’ artificial nesting structure on the south shore of the Tyne at Saltmeadows. In August this year I was part of the wildlife guide/guest speaker team from Ocean Wildlife Encounters, on a cruise from Dover to the Faroe Islands via Shetland (and back to Dover via Orkney) and I’ll be doing more guiding with OWE going forward.
Perhaps the thing I’m planning to do much more often though is write blog posts, so they’ll be covering our tours, photography, cruise guiding, Kittiwakes and, of course, dolphins 🙂
Sunday was our seascape photography workshop with Peter, after a few delays due to the weather…
With an experienced photographer, camera settings aren’t an important consideration to concentrate on so we spent some time looking at how to predict which waves are going to break obligingly and chatted about compositional techniques 🙂
Generische Medikamente können gefälscht werden und einen stark negativen Einfluss auf den menschlichen Organismus ausüben. Zu schweren Nebenwirkungen wie einem lebensbedrohlichen viagra bestellen Blutdruckabfall führen kann. Wir empfehlen auf natürliche Alternativen zu diesem Mittel zurückzugreifen.
Yesterday was our first mini-Safari this year, after filling the first three weeks of the year with stargazing events and all of the planning for other projects we’re going to be involved in this year, so it was great to meet up with Clare and Lisa, then Monica and Michael, for a few hours around our local patch…
The Wansbeck is a vast mudflat currently, and after a stop at the weir, where cormorant, little grebe and goldeneye were all feeding, we walked upriver to Castle Island. Scanning through the roosting gulls and dabbling ducks, a larger white bird was unhelpfully directly in the glare from the sun. There’s no mistaking the long thick legs and ruffled crest of a spoonbill though, and we found a spot where it was easier to see as it obligingly woke up, preened, looked around and then seemed to be on a mission as it marched along the muddy margins. Cormorants stretched, little egrets darted at small prey in the shallows, redshanks flew off calling, the eerie cries of curlew echoed along the valley and, uncharacteristically, a single fieldfare was hopping around a large paddock.
As dusk approached only five starlings appeared at a regular roost site as lapwings were scattered by a sparrowhawk and then teal and wigeon took to the air as a juvenile marsh harrier drifted over. Competing against the spoonbill in the hairstyle stakes, red-breasted mergansers paraded in front of us and the harrier reappeared…accompanied by a second juvenile, and then a male harrier joined the party and started talon-grappling with one of the juveniles as a Cetti’s warbler delivered it’s explosive calls from deep in the reeds and Jupiter shone through the evening twilight.
The time of year when we have to start mini-Safaris early afternoon always seems to creep up before unexpectedly arriving.
I met up with James, Michael and Colin ahead of an afternoon around Druridge Bay searching for otters and our first site had played host to four of them earlier in the day! Regular ripples of panic spread through the wigeon out on the water and that turned into terror as a juvenile marsh harrier made it’s way up and down both sides of the water. A little egret flew over a wader roost that was mainly common redshank, with a sprinkling of turnstones and a couple of common snipe. Our second site for the afternoon had at least two marsh harriers, including the same juvenile we’d seen earlier, and as pink-footed geese yapped overhead, water rails squealed, a Cetti’s warbler belted out it’s song and starlings blew past like leaves on the wind, the flocks of coot, mallard, wigeon, shoveler and gadwall kept nervously moving away from one reedbed as roe deer grazed near the water’s edge and dusk took hold of the little remaining daylight.
Monday was a 1-2-1 seascape photography workshop for Louisa and we started with exposure time, aperture and ISO (if you’ve never used a mirrorless camera, it makes it so much easier to see the effect of changing settings before actually taking a photo). With a tide falling from high, new compositions were presenting themselves right up to the point where it was cold and getting dark and with exposure and composition sorted, Louisa concentrated on judging which waves were going to break obligingly over the foreground rocks 🙂 I’m looking forward to our follow-up Zoom call/editing session to look at Louisa’s favourite images from the workshop.
