Sunset on the Lake

Sunset over Lake Garda

Another old picture, this time from a family holiday to the town of Bardolino by Lake Garda in Italy. It's a really lovely area and a great spot for a holiday - this fact was reinforced when I went to uni and the subject came up in conversation one night, it turned out that of the four people in the room, three of us had been holiday to the exact same town!

Most curious moment of the holiday: going for an evening walk by the lakeside we came across a concert being held by an Italian Pink Floyd tribute band, in aid of the orphans of the Chernobyl crisis. It also featured one of the orphans rapping in Ukrainian. The ceremonies were conducted in both Italian and German, and I was just about able to get the gist of what was going on and explain to my family. Never have I felt so proud of my dodgy grasp of the German language.

Simba...

Asian lion cub at London Zoo

One of the main reasons I wanted to go to London Zoo was to see the baby Asian lions they have at the minute. They were born in October 2011 so they're growing up fast but they are ludicrously cute. When we got to the lion house, it was late afternoon and they were snuggled up in a big pile of fur with their mum in a patch of sunshine, right up against one of the viewing windows in their enclosure.

Asian lions are super endangered. Although they used to have a range that continued as far west as Greece and Italy, these days they are only found in the wild in the Gir forest of Gujarat, India; a census of the lion population in 2011 indicated that there were about 411 Asiatic lions in the world, up from a total of 234 in 1936 when the first ever census was taken. They are threatened by habitat destruction, and are killed by electric fences and open wells.

Furball

Photograph of a prarie dog at London Zoo

This prarie dog was a tricky character; (s)he kept doing entirely adorable poses in parts of the enclosure that I couldn't get on camera. Outrageous!
And the keeper was most rude when I complained about it. Really, you'd think they'd train the animals to be more photogenic.

FUN FACTS ABOUT PRARIE DOGS:

1. Prarie dogs are rodents, not dogs, as I was surprised to learn aged eleven, having assumed they were America's equivalent of the dingo.*

2. According to Professor Con Slobodchikoff, prarie dogs may have the most sophisticated language of any animal, able to communicate the news of predators approaching as well as describing the colour, type of predator, and the direction it's coming from.

3. Prarie dogs are social creatures and are very affectionate, greeting one another with a prarie dog kiss.

4. Black-tailed prarie dogs live in large communities known as "towns". The largest known prarie dog town covered 25,00 square miles in Texas and was home to perhaps as many as four hundred million prarie dogs.

Who knew?
_________________________________________________________
*Without the baby eating.

Jolly Jack Tar

A close-up photograph of some tar or similar crud on a telephone pole near my house. Hurrah for that!

Wood Grain

I like the texture of old, weathered wood; it's always interesting. This is a shot of a wooden stile post on the way to a nearby pub.

Crystal Angel

Photograph of a crystal angel which my family was given as a Christmas present last year. We were actually kind of anxious about putting it on our tree this year because it's kind of precious and breakable, but it seems silly to have a beautiful decoration but never display it, so up she went after a suitably stable branch had been selected.

The photo makes the angel look rather massive, but it's actually teeny. And difficult to photograph...

Warped Bauble

Gold Bauble

This is a photograph of me taking a photograph of me taking a photograph of a bauble. There is quite a lot of recursion going on here, and if only I had been holding a big mirror instead of my camera, it could have gone on forever.Nevermind.

Sadly it's very far from the sharpest picture ever, owing to the rubbish quality of light in my house in December. Oh well. Roll around spring and it'll be back to lovely flower photos...

I believe that this is the first photo I've posted which actually has me in it! Obviously I am terrified of stalkers, although if you can identify me from my spotted Christmas fleece I would be fairly impressed as well as scared.

Field of Gold

This photo was taken on an incredibly hot and sunny day, of a whole host of orange flowers growing outside a tumbledown greenhouse. As previous blog pictures can testify, I take quite a lot of photographs of orange flowers - I guess they must particularly appeal to me. It's such a cheerful colour that you can look over your photographs on a cold day and feel that summery glow all over again.

Sunshine Flower

Despite yesterday's outpouring of a single interesting fact, I'm back to wallowing in my own ignorance with today's flower. The photo was taken on a recent visit to Cornwall, where we visited several gardens, all of them absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was Trebah Gardens, which not only boasts its own private beach, but also has a bamboo maze, a shady secret passage beneath the giant leaves of huge gunnera plants (also known as "Elephant's Rhubarb") and (my new favourite word), a stumpery. Yes, even their collection of tree stumps is awesome.