Eucharis amazonica, Amazon Lily

E. amazonica is a bulbous perennial to 75cm, with narrowly elliptic leaves and erect stems bearing an umbel of fragrant white flowers, the stamens united at the base to form a cup.

It is a lovely house plant for foliage and stunning when in flower -- eight flower spikes above.
See http://apps.rhs.org.uk/plantselector/plant?plantid=2911 for the RHS description.

It will need to be divided soon (in Spring), when spare bulbs will be available.

Recylable plastics... from biomaterials.

Plastics from sugar cane!

Never before has my blog promoted a commercial company.
And I'm not doing so now just because my daughter is the presenter of this video on youtube. 

The message is powerful. 

Recyclable biobased plastics are being produced in The Netherlands, reducing our dependence on oil.

Check out the link below.

http://youtu.be/S_C4x-jjZBc

From one proud father.

Cuckmere Haven birds, 18th November 2012

These meanders of the former course of the Cuckmere river are rich in bird life.

You will need binoculars to see them.

Above, cormorants, heron, oystercatcher and a gull.

There is a redshank in there somewhere

On the river bank itself was a gull and a redshank.

The little bird to the left of the gull is a little grebe.  It spends a lot of time under the water.

It looked like close to a hundred black-backed gulls in this field.

There was a small flock of greenfinches on this island.

The Seven Sisters as viewed from Cuckmere Haven beach.

Right on the skyline was a stonechat.

To escape the crowds we returned to Exceat via open access land and the South Downs way path.

There were large flocks of Canada geese in the Cuckmere valley.

Another magical day out in Sussex by the sea.

Pagham harbour linear walk - just great!

This was a walk that we did on Saturday, 3rd November 2012.  Little egrets are common all along the Sussex coast, so it was no surprise to see this one near the beginning of this walk from the RSPB centre at Pagham harbour yesterday.
Stopping at the Ferry pool hide, there were views of teal.

A long way away, were a group of avocets that a kindly birder with a very powerful telescope showed us.  With binoculars they were white spots.  A photo with my camera was impossible.

In the centre of the picture above were a couple of herons and a little egret.

 Here is an egret in flight.

Far away were a some shellducks.

We also saw (but could not get a picture of) a Little grebe.

Near the Church Norton hide were a couple of Great crested grebes

 A small flock of Teal were feeding in the intertidal mud flats.

A gull.

Across the water were some redshanks.

 

 Further away still were some Oystercatchers and Cormorants

 

We walked around the coast to Selsey Lifeboat station under a darkening sky.

A couple of Oystercatchers paced the shoreline.

From the promenade at Selsey the turnstones are common and used to people.

This is a great linear walk using the local bus to get back to the starting point -- on this day, just before the rains came.

  

Fox sunbathing today

What a fine fox.  She tidies up the garden well too -- especially when there are debreasted pigeons to be disposed of.  She leaves nothing but feathers.

This is the view of the fox from where the above pictures were taken. 

Techie stuff
The pictures were shot in RAW mode and manipulated using Picasa.  The camera used was a Panasonic DMC-FZ8 with a 35mm equiv 36-432 12xOptical zoom Leica lens. I prefer this camera to my more expensive DMC-G3.  The G3 has the edge in low light conditions like woodlands though.  Also its movable screen with a manual focus is the best for close up photo's, where an auto focus mode is less reliable to capture what you want to focus on.

A Curlew at Rye Harbour nature reserve, 27th October 2012

It was just freezing in a bitter north wind yesterday at Rye.

This Curlew was probing for food.

It seemed happy enough.

Camber Castle, Rye, East Sussex, 27th October 2012

A walk past Camber Castle. Rye, built by Henry VIII in 1544 is impressive -- especially as one realises that the following path was once a beach and before that -- below the sea.

The "waves" of grass-covered shingle mark the build up of shingle beaches, which left this castle high and dry well away from the original shore line.