Wildlife photos and info from around the world
Yes, I'm Andy (or Andrew to most people, but hey, that wouldn't make a catchy sounding website name would it?). In my spare time I love nothing more than getting out and about and doing nature photography, partly to 'collect' memories of what I see, and also to celebrate the great beauty and diversity of the natural world with others.
View Nature Profiles, the key area on the website that's growing regularly with original photos and some scientific information on many species from around the world. I've got a real passion for reptiles, but Britain isn't the best spot in the world to satisfy that interest, so I've learnt to appreciate and photograph all sorts of other stuff. Whatever the season, and whatever the place, there's always something interesting to be found.
Yesterday was a bit of a write-off for wildlife watching - lots of driving from Galicia to Castilla y Leon. Discovered a great visitor centre at Lago de Sanabria - not mentioned in my books, and it must have cost a fortune. The place is great for wildlife too, with a wide variety of habitats - the glacial lake (Lago), and surrounding Mediterranean habitats, rising to mountains with subalpine relict vegetation.
I did two walks here - one up the Rio Tera canyon, and one around the high altitude lagoon at the end of the road from the monastery of San Martin. The Rio Tera canyon is a great walk, although typical of Spanish walks, the route markers can be frusrating hard to find, or entirely absent in places! The canyon was full of lizard life, and every pool seemed to have a resident Iberian Water Frog (Rana perezi).
The lagoon walk was less inspiring, especially the main tourist track, which like everywhere (seemingly) in Spain has a distressing amount of discarded rubbish along its flanks. Once off the main track I saw gentians, more frogs (the whole lake resounded with their calls when the sun came out), and a range of birds in the meadows - linnets, wheatears, choughs.
Here are some of the sights I saw:
Bath White (Pontia daplidice)
Iberian Water Frog (Rana perezi)
Rio Tera Canyon