Back when I was a teacher, and developing demonstration experiments, I came across a piece of advice that has stuck with me since then ‘prior practice prevents poor presentation’.\u00a0 It served me well; it’s far better to accidentally set fire to the ceiling tiles in your classroom when there’s just yourself, a lab technician and a fire extinguisher there.\u00a0 And what did I learn from that incident? Make sure your class are sitting towards the back of the room, and keep the fire extinguisher close to hand \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
We apply a similar philosophy with NEWT.\u00a0 Recce sites consistently and, even when a site is regularly producing sightings of the target species, keep searching for new sites too.\u00a0 Preparation for our beginners photography<\/a> workshop at the weekend involved baiting three locations with hazelnuts, to maximise the chances of Red Squirrels<\/strong><\/em> appearing right in front of us in a photogenic location with lighting angles worked out well in advance.\u00a0 We visited the sites on Saturday in poor weather conditions and re-baited with over a pound of nuts.\u00a0 Sunday dawned and I met up with Bryan.\u00a0 His previous trip with us<\/a> had been a successful search for Otters<\/strong><\/em>, and Red Squirrels<\/strong><\/em> have always been an easier mammal to track down…<\/p>\n The weather couldn’t have been better; bright sunshine always helps.\u00a0 Coal Tits, Great Tits, Blue Tits, Long-tailed Tits, Chaffinches, Blackbirds <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Magpies<\/strong><\/em> seemed to be everywhere around us.\u00a0 However, not any sight of a squirrel <\/strong><\/em>\ud83d\ude42 They’d cleaned out the nuts from all of the sites we’d baited, so we re-baited, and waited.\u00a0 The likely explanation is that the combination of a stiff cold breeze and the extraordinary number of people walking their dogs through the woods meant that they were keeping their heads down.\u00a0 So I’ve set up a baiting area in a much quieter piece of woodland, and invited Bryan to come along for a session photographing the squirrels there once I’ve determined the best angles and times of day.\u00a0 No matter how much preparation you put in, sometimes the unpredictable nature of wildlife still gets the better of you \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back when I was a teacher, and developing demonstration experiments, I came across a piece of advice that has stuck with me since then ‘prior practice prevents poor presentation’.\u00a0 It served me well; it’s far better to accidentally set fire to the ceiling tiles in your classroom when there’s just yourself, a lab technician and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16,139],"tags":[46,102,101,45,121,47,833,116],"class_list":["post-2241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-northumberland","category-photography","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-blue-tit","tag-chaffinch","tag-coal-tit","tag-great-tit","tag-long-tailed-tit","tag-magpie","tag-red-squirrel","tag-robin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2243,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions\/2243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}