Seeing Red

This last week has seen some wonderful weather countrywide with temperatures way above the normal.It has indeed been more like Summer than Spring and I took full advantage with a number of trips out. I spent most of the time in the Bowland Forest area of Lancashire photographing the early signs of Spring and looking for adders and dippers. I was lucky with my first sighting of a female adder and some nice images of a pair of dippers near Dunsop Bridge.More about these excursions will follow in a later posting. I am posting some more images of red grouse as I have seen many birds over the course of the last week.A couple of walks up Clougha Fell provided some memorable sightings of red grouse on their breeding territory. Clougha is a wonderful little rocky fell which overlooks the western coast of Lancashire and provides views to the Lakeland fells. It is also covered in heather on it's upper slopes which is the natural habitat of the red grouse.The cock grouse were obvious as they stood on guard over their chosen parts of the fell and provided nice opportunities as they posed on top of nearby rocky outcrops. The females were for the most part concealed in the heather and moorland grasses but did occasionally show themselves. I particularly like the images of the hen grouse as the show the wonderful cryptic colouration of the plumage which conceals them so well from any predators. I hope you enjoy the images of the grouse on their breeding territories on the western rocky flank of Clougha and eventually I may post more. I do have however have many other images of the Bowland wildlife to publish and as mentioned above my next posting will probably be about the adders and dippers it was my good fortune to see this last week. Thanks for looking in and enjoy your weekend.