{"id":2495,"date":"2014-07-28T16:29:11","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T15:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2495"},"modified":"2014-07-28T16:29:11","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T15:29:11","slug":"life-through-a-magnifying-lens-family-mini-beast-hunt-21072014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/northumberland\/life-through-a-magnifying-lens-family-mini-beast-hunt-21072014","title":{"rendered":"Life through a (magnifying) lens; Family mini-beast hunt 21\/07\/2014"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our routine (if anything involving wildlife can ever be routine&#8230;) safari trips have brought some remarkable experiences for our clients, and for us too.\u00a0 &#8216;Big stuff&#8217; (for want of a better a description) is always popular; <em><strong>Red Squirrel, Otter, White-beaked Dolphin, Badger<\/strong><\/em>, <em><strong>Minke Whale<\/strong><\/em> are just a few examples of those perpetual crowd-pleasers.\u00a0 Sometimes though, I think we may lose a sense of perspective and forget that the ecosystem has a lot of &#8216;little stuff&#8217; too&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I collected Penny, Nathan, Alfie, Arthur and Millie from Alnmouth and we set off for a morning in southeast Northumberland.\u00a0 I armed the two boys with compact binoculars, and Millie with one of my favorite bits of kit \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Sarah, all of our friends and relatives, and many of our clients know that I&#8217;m a bit of a gear geek&#8230;but a 23mm 10x doublet hand lens is a relatively simple instrument that opens up a world that is quite remarkable.\u00a0 The boys used the binoculars to look at insects, flowers, grass, the sky and anything else that was in front of us, and Millie learned how to use a hand lens.\u00a0 With a sample pot as our other toy of choice for the morning we captured, observed and released <em><strong>hoverflies<\/strong><\/em>, <em><strong>moths<\/strong><\/em>, <em><strong>soldier beetles<\/strong><\/em>, a <em><strong>Common Blue Damselfly<\/strong><\/em>, a <em><strong>Bee Fly<\/strong><\/em> and all sorts of weird and wonderful mini-beasties.<\/p>\n<p>The enthusiasm of Alfie, Arthur and Millie reminded me that, every so often, I need to stop looking up into the sky or out to sea and look down at the small world around our feet \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our routine (if anything involving wildlife can ever be routine&#8230;) safari trips have brought some remarkable experiences for our clients, and for us too.\u00a0 &#8216;Big stuff&#8217; (for want of a better a description) is always popular; Red Squirrel, Otter, White-beaked Dolphin, Badger, Minke Whale are just a few examples of those perpetual crowd-pleasers.\u00a0 Sometimes though, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,139],"tags":[647,289,645,651,649],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-northumberland","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-bee-fly","tag-common-blue-damselfly","tag-hoverfly","tag-moths","tag-soldier-beetle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495","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=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2497,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions\/2497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}