Living with a landscape photographer presents a special set of problems. The two times of day in which they are most interested are sunrise and sunset.

The problem with photographing sunrise is, of course, that one’s landscape photographer, and therefore oneself, has to be up and out well before sunrise to travel to the appointed location to wait for that all important moment when the light is right. This was epitomized by A Prial of Castles in Northumberland last September when a 5:00 AM alarm roused us. Midsummer, naturally, would be worse with the sun breaking the horizon at an inconsiderate 4:30 AM requiring, say, a 3:30 AM alarm – hardly worth going to bed in the first place, really.

Sunset presents an entirely different problem. 6 o’clock is bar o’clock but bar o’clock doesn’t make a good bed fellow with the need to drive to and from sunset locations. This is particularly acute in mid-summer when, should we actually be blessed with any sun, it doesn’t kiss the distant horizon until about 9:30 PM. At 9:30 PM, I should be passed the 2nd bottle of wine and onto a small snifter of brandy.

You’d think that, being on the east coast of England, I’d have been saved from any sunset depravations. The sun sets in the west, after all. However, the east of England curves round, runs along the north coast of Norfolk and dives down into the Wash. Hunstanton, looking out over the Wash, faces west. Here was Francine’s target for today.

And so it was that, at about 7:00 PM I found myself in Hunstanton, stone cold sober, looking for a fish and chip shop. I found two; they were both closed/closing. Well, it’s still low season, I suppose. We did, however, find an acceptable looking pub with fish and chips on the bar menu. Furthermore, it had two other attractions: Adnams bitter on draught and large picture windows facing west over the beach into the eventual sunset.

We scoffed our fish ‘n’ chips as Francine watched her target draw slowly but inexorably closer. Still with about an hour to go, she headed down onto the beach to pick her spot leaving me to finish my Adnams. Eventually I tired both of the inane prattling at the table beside me, and of my empty glass before me, and went out to watch.

As I was wandering around watching Francine at work, I spotted a shot of my own that I fancied trying. I hastened back to the car, grabbed a camera and returned to join in the fun. After a few experimental shots, I had one that looked more or less as I was visualizing. Here is Francine once again “waiting for the light”.

Enough of the incidental action off stage, here is an example of what Francine was ending up with using her fancy filters to balance the exposure over the frame.

The brandy back at Guillaume was wonderful – late but wonderful.

I’m frequently told that flower photography does not require strong sun but benefits from the diffused lighting and lack of shadows resulting what real old Kodak 35mm or 120 roll film boxes used to call cloudy bright. Well, today was cloudy and, I suppose, occasionally bright. Again!

Francine has this thing about lavender fields, which are stunning in Provence but which we usually miss because we run away from Satan’s Little Disciple season. Just up the road from us nearing Hunstanton is Norfolk Lavender which we decided to pay a visit. My ultimate goal was to visit Cley-next-the-Sea just about in the centre of Norfolk’s north coast where there used to be an excellent smokehouse selling sublime smoked eels, amongst other taste-bud-tickling goods. There were various other places of potential interest in between.

Norfolk Lavender: this turned out to be more of an exhibition/collection/museum, with a few rows of several different species of lavender on display, rather than massed fields of commercially grown lavender, together with the inevitable couple of typical why-would-anyone-buy-any-of-this-stuff gift shops. Well, all right, some of the lavender potpourris would probably be OK for granny but most of it was mugs with cringingly sweet pictures of dogs, table mats with chocolate box scenery, etc. – not for me. There was an interesting wicker figure in a modest field of lavender which was quite nicely done. Norfolk Lavender apparently has 100 acres of lavender under cultivation somewhere but where, I know not. The best bit was a delicatessen with a good collection of meat and cheeses.

Heading for the north coast with olfactory organs reeling from lavender, we happened past a field full of bright red poppies; quite a colour change. We found a farmer’s gateway to pull off the narrow lane. This was reminiscent of the field of massed poppies that we found last year in France near Le Loir. We’d never seen this many before in the UK, though. The poppies, plus a few other intruders, seemed to be polluting a field of rape, no longer yellow, of course.

We tore ourselves away and fought our way through Burnham Market, where the world and his dog were parked and gawping [wouldn’t want to live there], and headed next for Wells-next-the-Sea. Quaint phraseology, some of these Norfolk town names have. Wells was being rebuilt. OK, not really, but it was having some serious renovation done on the harbour front creating what looked to be ultimately expensive apartments in an old warehouse building. A fishing boat was offloading crate-loads of delicious crabs. Avoiding the renovation work, Francine tried a stitched panorama of the water channel and harbour.

We worked our way further along several more miles of the coast, passing through Stiffkey, pronounced Stookey. Quaint pronunciation some of these Norfolk town names have. Soon we arrived at our final destination of Cley-next-the-Sea and its wonderful smokehouse. Not only is Clay notable for its world class smokehouse but also for its having a free car park – brilliant! The smokehouse counter was filled with all manner of nostril-tempting smoked goods. Well, not quite all manner, more most manner. A swift enquiry revealed that smoked eels were no longer on the bill of fare. Fair enough, in fact, jolly good show. The poor old eel, with its complex life-cycle of breeding way out in the Sargasso Sea, is yet another species in serious decline and is now protected. So it should be. Eels have been over fished, over jellied and over smoked over the years. My love of wildlife overrides my love of fine food, so I wholeheartedly approve of the eel’s protected status.

Having made a 60-mile round trip pilgrimage, we contented ourselves with a few other no less delicious smoked temptations as a consolation prize.

July 1st and our first full day installed at Sandringham. Yesterday’s spell of summer sun is  now over and the forecast for the rest of the week is mainly for cloud cover, with some rain, though there is a suggestion that we might get a barbecue-friendly evening today. If so, I’d got a free range chicken ready to go. 😉

Francine had seen something about some colourful cliffs at Hunstanton a short drive north-west of us. Our opening gambit was to go and investigate these followed by moving further round the north coast of Norfolk to an RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh.

This part of the coast seems to like levying quite hefty car park charges with signs such as “All Day: £5” leaping out at the poor old motorist. Whilst that may not be so unreasonable for an all day stay, we never do an all day stay in one place. Typically, we tend to spend an hour or two in, say, three places a day. With no hourly rate on offer, that sort of car park tariff represents bad value. Driving around, we eventually found our sort of car park offering £1.80 for an hour. Better.

Just as Francine was about to head down onto the beach leaving me to buy a ticket, a large group of what we think were exchange students swarmed by and began taking forever to get through the narrow entrance and down onto said beach. Not wishing to waste 15 minutes of our hour baulked behind them, I lurked around the ticket machine to delay buying my ticket. I needn’t have bothered; once I went ahead the ticket machine began seemingly randomly rejecting perfectly valid coin of the realm such that it took me nearly 15 minutes to get it to accept my payment. Bloody technology!

There was a stiff breeze blowing along the beach, now swarming with foreign exchange students, and both sky and sea were essentially grey. Directly in front of me was a sight that I just do not understand but categorize as the typical English seaside holiday. I fail to see the point of sitting behind a windbreak on a wind-blown beach, well below 20°C (ignoring wind chill), wrapped in jackets whilst looking at a grey sea reflecting a grey sky. Presumably, these are the folks who don’t mind shelling out £5 to park all day. Truly bizarre. Mind you, they’d find chasing wildlife bizarre, too, I suspect, so we’re even. 🙂

Turning our backs on the foreign exchange students and the beach die-hards, we headed left to the cliffs where, I have to say, I was decidedly underwhelmed. Underwhelmed, that is, until I spotted a man staring at one section of cliff through binoculars. Using my good ol’ long lens as a telescope, I could see a couple of pairs of Fulmars nesting on cliff ledges. As the sun made a brief appearance, one of the Fulmars began demonstrating its aerial agility by swooping back and forth. How marvellous to be able to do that. Two strangers in the sky at once, a Fulmar and the sun.

Next stop was the RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh. The main car park was already full of twitchers’ vehicles. We went on to the overflow car park which was only half full of twitchers’ vehicles, parked and munched our lunch before heading into the reserve itself. The reserve claims “almost 20” species of Odos but action was scarce. Let’s face it, with little to no sun and temperatures struggling only into the higher teens, it really wasn’t an Odo kind of day. We did wander round a recently opened marsh area via a well constructed boardwalk, finding five species, before heading out along the 1km path, passing a few pools, towards the beach.

Several hides that we past were full of all those car-park-filling twitchers staring doggedly out of the hides’ viewing ports. I think of myself as big fan of wildlife but I really couldn’t spend a significant portion of the day staring out of one hide in case something turned up. I guess that’s why I could never go fishing, either – the two pastimes seem similar.

The pools we wandered past produced a few interesting birds, including an Avocet, whose feathers were being ruffled by the wind, and an Egret, which obligingly caught a fish as I watched. The beach produced nothing but more feather-ruffling wind and sand.

Nicely done, RSPB, they really do do well for wild places.

The suggestion of a barbecue friendly evening was nothing but a cruel trick so Agile Caterers Ltd suddenly changed their evening menu to chicken Thai curry.

The last day of June and time to leave the Caravan Club site at Ludham Bridge in East Norfolk to head over to Sandringham estate in West Norfolk for the opposition’s (Camping and Caravanning Club) site. There was no rush; it’s about a 90-minute drive and we couldn’t check in before midday so we had a leisurely morning packing before wandering down to the River Ant one last time before bidding adieu.

In some way, I’m looking forward to moving on. Though this area is extremely pleasant and the site very well situated from an interest viewpoint, it is appallingly situated from a Tesco Mobile signal point of view. Occasionally we see a glimmer of a bar which almost immediately disappears. Effectively, there is no signal. Technology is all very well but one tends to come to rely on it and when it lets you down it’s frustrating. I mean, here we sat for a week on the Norfolk Broads where countless rental pleasure craft float past, a mere 12 miles from Norwich, England’s most easterly city, and 13 miles from Great Yarmouth, one of our major seaside resorts, the Blackpool of the east, and we have no mobile phone signal. This is hardly the back of beyond for Darwin’s sake. How can we do this stuff so badly? It’s bloody incredible! Old fashioned phone boxes were more reliable, except when attacked by mindless vandals, of course.

Looking forward to there perhaps being a mobile phone signal on the Sandringham estate – I mean, surely HM would be on one of those bargain Tesco Mobile tariffs and they’d have to make sure she had a signal, wouldn’t they? – we bumped, bounced and jiggled Guillaume’s way across several poorly surfaced, relatively minor East Norfolk roads before joining the smoother and decidedly more comfortable A148 into West Norfolk and on to Sandringham.

After years of being steadfastly locked in to Caravan Club sites, we seem to be becoming fans of the opposition campsites. We used the opposition for the first time in Shropshire recently and were very quickly impressed. Both these clubs have campsites, almost on top of each other, within the Sandringham estate and we chose the CCC based upon good ol’ Google Earth views. It is attractively laid out amongst trees giving it a less crammed and less regimented feel. We settled in quickly, had a spot of lunch and went for an exploratory bike ride. We headed west towards the coast for some waterways but found no critters, surprisingly.

Did you spot that conundrum? We’re in Norfolk on the east coast of Britain but we headed west on our bikes to go towards the coast. Look at a map – work it out. 🙂

For the second time this year ❗ we have been blessed with a pleasantly warm and sunny evening. Steady, don’t get excited. In a fit of meteorological foresight, we had bought some very good sirloin steak to throw on the barbecue in case this very situation arose. However, with an equivalently alarming lack of foresight, we have contrived to arrive at Sandringham with only 1½ bottles of wine in Guillaume’s store cupboard. To every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. Shame on us, poor show, we really should know better than this. Mercifully, a bottle of Soberano, purchased recently from the famous Roys of Wroxham, came to our rescue and alcohol levels could be maintained. Cold turkey avoided – phew!

Oh, and we’ve got a four bar mobile phone signal. How civilized is that after a week with none? HM can keep in touch with the family. 🙂

I can’t help but notice that our weather forecasts involving the arrival of rain seem to be more accurate than those involving any suggestion of sun. Perhaps in an effort to boost morale, our forecasters have been speaking of sunny spells when sometimes only a single, and often very brief, sunny spell may actually arrive, the remainder of the sky being covered by clouds in a fetching array of various shades of grey. I sort of understand the positive attitude but it raises ones expectations which are often dashed. With the guessed at arrival time for today’s rain being 1:00 PM-ish, we hopped on our bikes to look around some local lanes.

We started off down more of Ludham’s back streets, ended up at Womack Water (very pleasant) and then struck out into the farming countryside past several desirable residences. Coming across a roadside dyke with a 90° bend and a few scattered water soldier plants, we hopped off our bikes for a quick gander. At first it looked dead but then I started spotting damselflies in the plants. A sunny spell arrived and I spotted at first one, then a second Norfolk Hawker (Aeshna isosceles). Being out mainly for a bike ride, we’d left several kilos of photographic equipment off our backs and were ill-equipped for dragonfly photography but Francine did her admirable best with Crappy Snappy, just for documentary evidence. Norfolk Hawkers may be rare enough for you to require a license to handle them but they seem locally quite abundant. I thought we were going to have trouble finding any but it seems not. Excellent!

On our return we made a detour into Potter Heigham. Potter Heigham is one of the better known names on the Broads, probably because of it’s unfeasibly small bridge which, I believe, you used to require a pilot to get your boat through. Other than its famous bridge, Potter Heigham is essentially little more than a collection of boatyards and Lathams, a shop which had the feel of a very large Pound Stretcher store. [I don’t if that’s one word or two – who cares?] This is one of those stores with strategically placed TVs playing those annoying pre-recorded adverts regaling you to purchase yet another useless kitchen gadget, always a pointless space-wasting uni-tasker, with a final voice over urging you to, “take your pointless, space-wasting uni-tasker to the check out now!”. This seemed to be where Mr & Mrs Polyester did most of their shopping. We left as rapidly as possible, skipping the checkouts and without our pointless space-wasting uni-tasker. Roys of Wroxham has little to fear from this quarter.

The rain arrived on schedule as we arrived back chez Guillaume. Well done Met. Office!

A third reasonable day (i.e. dry until later this afternoon) forecast. What have we done to deserve this?

Francine had a hankering to see the sea so we headed for an area of dunes on the north-east Norfolk coast between Horsey and Winterton-on-Sea. Somewhere in the 3-mile stretch of dunes between these two places, we’d been told, were some freshwater pools supporting the rare Natterjack Toad (Bufo calamita). Knowing no better, we made for Horsey, parked and spotted a sign advertising a wildlife reserve and Natterjack Toads, amongst other things. We began scaling the grass-covered sandy dunes in anticipation.

Walking on soft sand is hard work. A mile on this sort of ground is worth at least two miles on terra firma, possibly more. I confess to being a little confused, nay troubled, by our information which suggested that the pools were to be found “on the seaward side of the dunes”. Unlikely, I thought. Firstly, any fresh water in any depression here would very quickly soak into the very porous, soft sand. Secondly, the only thing here “on the seaward side of the dunes” was beach and saltwater in the form of the North Sea. I could not escape the thought that we were hunting in the wrong place. From our vantage point atop the coastal dune, we did spot a seal’s head making occasional appearances in the surf but that was all.

After about 1½ miles (i.e. 3 miles worth) of sandy trudging, we descended on the landward side of the dunes to head back to our car before our 2-hour parking ticket turned into a pumpkin. Lo and behold before us, another sign advertising the beginning of the nature reserve, which seemed to be decidedly on the landward side of the dune. Alas, with thoughts of a pumpkin ripening, we had stumbled across the reserve too late. It seems the reserve is nearer to the Winterton-on-Sea end of the dunes. We began heading back to the car on a firmer track when Francine spotted orchids in the grass. I left her happily snapping away while I returned so as not to miss the pumpkin harvest.

Back in the car park, I discovered more orchids which I pointed out to Francine when she eventually returned about 15 minutes B.P. (Before Pumpkin). Further snapping ensued as did further confusion.

Right, orchids. When we arrived and first found orchids, Francine was of the opinion that they were Southern Marsh Orchids (Dactylorhiza  praetermissa). Back at base she delved into her WildGuides  book, Britain’s Orchids (David Lang) and discovered to her consternation that there were a couple of v. similar species, the Early Marsh Orchid (Dactylorhiza incarnata) and the Narrow-leaved Marsh Orchid (Dactylorhiza traunsteineri). To add to the confusion, the Southern Marsh Orchid is “a complex” with several different subspecies. Making matters even worse, it appears that these tricksy little plants are prone to hybridize with each other. Now Francine was tearing out fistfuls of her not inconsiderable hair.

We left the car park, without a pumpkin but littered with Francine’s discarded locks, and headed for Winterton-on-Sea via the National Trust’s so-called Horsey Mill which, as far as I can tell, isn’t a mill at all but a pump. Some of the wind “mills” in the Norfolk Broads, maybe even all of them, are actually pumps which drained the land by raising water up into rivers. Go figure!

After disturbing a nesting Swallow by buying an ice cream at the NT kiosk – it was nesting right beside the serving hatch and flew off every time anybody bought anything – we made it to Winterton. Avoiding a second parking fee, we found a legal place in town to bail out and walked just a little further once again to trudge through the dunes. We went “ooh, ah” at a Little Tern colony nicely fenced off on the beach for protection [excellent idea but a boring stretch of sand that we couldn’t approach closely – unphotogenic] before thinking, once again, that we were hunting the Snark. Becoming tired of walking on soft sandy dunes for a second time in one day, we turned to return via the most direct route we could find whereupon we stumbled across a fenced off small pool [keen on fences around here] bearing a sign announcing the presence of Natterjack Toads. Could we see one or hear one? No!

We got back to Guillaume just as the forecast rain started. Very accurate, well done Met Office.

With the prospect of another reasonable day in our currently crappy weather pattern, we were expecting to be able to continue our Norfolk Hawker hunt with a visit to its well publicized breeding ground at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s site of Upton Broad and Marshes In this context, “another reasonable day” means a day with temperatures approaching the seasonal average, some sunny spells and rain that doesn’t arrive until later in the afternoon. After a few necessary camp chores, we packed some chorizo and tomato sandwiches for lunch and headed out for an 11:00 AM start.

We’d been given a map and directed to two areas of the reserve, the so-called turf ponds near the entrance and a water soldier dyke at the north-eastern extreme of the reserve. Being near the entrance, we hit the turf ponds first. This was an intriguing habitat different from any I’d seen before: small, roughly circular pools, each surrounded my a mown grass border to facilitate access, with taller grasses between them all. Whilst not what I’d describe as swarming, there was plenty of activity to keep us amused until lunchtime. A Norfolk Hawker or two were hawking about but not settling for photo shoots. Black-tailed Skimmers (Orthetrum cancellatum) and Four-spotted Chasers (Libellula quadrimaculata) were much more amenable.

Then we hit the boardwalks to head for the Water Soldier dyke. For some peculiar reason, the UK population of Norfolk Hawkers (Aeshna isosceles) has something of a fixation about Water Soldier (Stratiotes aloides). Water Soldier is a curious water plant that spends most of its year submerged until, in summer, it rises to the surface to produce a single flower. In the UK, the dragonflies seem to be tightly bound to Water Soldier for their reproduction, laying their eggs on the plant when it has surfaced. I said “peculiar” because the reliance on Water Soldier seems not to be the case abroad where A. isosceles exists without Water Soldier and where, naturally enough, it is not called a Norfolk Hawker. 🙂

We eventually came to the dyke which was, indeed, absolutely covered/choked with surfaced rosettes of Water Soldier. A couple of (presumably) male hawkers were cruising back and forth holding territory. A pair formed a copulation wheel – not a pair of males, you understand – right in front of me and zoomed off. Then we spotted a female ovipositing deep within the swathes of Water Soldier. She was mostly obscured by the leaf fronds but it makes an interesting shot.

On our return wander we came across our first/only perched male which makes an interesting comparison, for amateur odonatologists anyway, with a female that we also passed along the track. The female was being videoed by a man staring through a large movie camera, complete with furry microphone, mounted on a very large tripod. We paused at some distance and let him finish before advancing, for which he was very grateful commenting that, “very few people would have been so considerate”. I know only too well what it’s like to have a shot ruined by a passing stranger or a passing stranger’s galloping canine. We chatted awhile while I scared off the hawker. Though dogs are banned at Upton, it seems that dog owners bring them in anyway, particularly at weekends, despite notices being displayed. Our new friend had had several altercations with dog owners and was not shy about expressing his hatse of dogs. He proved to be a very willing recruit to my Dog-Free World Society. What a nice man! 😀

The sexes of the Norfolk Hawker appear very similar and I was having trouble with some of my identifications but I think I’ve got it now.

We’ve been looking forward to today. The weather forecasters have been suggesting/guessing that today would be good as far as England goes. This is not, you understand, good in the absolute sense. Good weather in the absolute sense means, in my book, a cloudless day with constant sunshine. In England, normally, good means no rain, with a few small, white, fluffy clouds occasionally obscuring the sun. This year, good in England means dry, with occasional sunny intervals in between quite large, threateningly black clouds that don’t actually discharge any precipitation. The latter is what we got, some decent spells of sunshine but a sky that was sometimes shrouded by vaguely threatening clouds.

Overnight, our visiting celebrity Norfolk Hawker (Aeshna isosceles) had disappeared from the hole/recess in the hedge surrounding our pitch. I was surprised, 08:30 seemed a bit early for it to have flown. After a simple breakfast, we kicked off the day by visiting the river at Ludham Bridge and doing a dragonfly survey. Several Red-eyed Damselflies (Erythromma najas) were our most interesting find.

On to the main event of the day and our first real Norfolk Hawker hunt. Acting on recommendations from none other than the president of the BDS, whom I’d emailed before leaving on our trip, we headed for Alderfen. Alderfen is a Norfolk Wildlife Trust site with absolutely no signs whatsoever advertising its presence from the road. Maybe they don’t want people to go there? Fortunately instructions and a map got us there and we fell in love with the place almost immediately, a delightfully rural location that was very tranquil and peaceful courtesy of there being only ourselves and the Odos in residence. Perfect!

Alderfen proved to be the mother lode of Azure Damselflies (Coenagrion puella). The trouble was, I’d been told that the place was also home to the not-so-common-but-very-similar-looking Variable Damselfly (Coenagrion pulchellum), which meant that I needed to study as many as possible to ensure that I knew what I was looking at. After countless Azures, I finally found a few Variables, including this very exhibitionist pair in cop.

I’d just finished suggesting that our campsite celebrity visitor might be the only Norfolk Hawker (Aeshna isosceles) that we saw this trip when one whizzed down the Alderfen track we were on. We subsequently found one, perhaps the same one, perched near to the ground in the grass.

Shortly afterwards, we found several more Norfolk Hawkers holding territory over various stretches of water, flying back and forth, frequently chasing off Four-spotted Chasers (Libellula quadrimaculata), occasionally tussling with each other and very occasionally settling, though not terribly conveniently. They really were quite entertaining and Francine swung into manual focus mode to grab an in-flight shot, clever old thing that she is.

Well satisfied, later in the afternoon we set off on our bikes to investigate some of the local lanes. A couple of miles got us to the Broads Authority’s How Hill where there is a wildlife walking trail. Here, three generations of one family joined us watching yet another Norfolk Hawker hunting over the grassland near the entrance and they began quizzing me about Norfolk Hawkers and dragonflies in general. How satisfying it was to find people interested enough to ask questions and to pass on a little knowledge.

A little way into the wildlife walk, something was attracting a lot of attention from a group of four or five people. Norfolk has another insect celebrity, being the only place in the UK where Swallowtail butterflies (Papilio machaon) can be found. We’ve seen them in France and Spain but here was our first in the UK. So intent on trying to snap it was I that I lost yet another expensive pair of sunglasses whilst doing so. Fortunately, I realized shortly afterwards, backtracked and found them in the grass near to where the Swallowtail had been. I still managed to get a blade of grass over one wing tip, too. Darn!

Our route back to Guillaume took us by the ruins of St. Benet’s Abbey which, owing to a large amount of restoration work, are currently completely unphotogenic, being surrounded by ugly metal fencing. The River Bure beside it, however, delivered a very photogenic Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus) and its chick as they drifted downstream in the late afternoon sun. [Sun? Yes, sun. Unbelievable.] Grebe chicks really are painfully cute in a stripy, fluffy kind of way.