Isn't Wildlife Wonderful !

Now have you got a few minutes to sit down with a cuppa?

perhaps enjoy a chai spice biscotti - find recipe here

 ... and look at some lovely wildlife photographs. Here are just two out of ten wonderful images which can be seen in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015. Link for more photo's is given below.

Snow Hare By Rosamund MacFarlane

One of Rosamund’s photographic ambitions was to photograph Scottish mountain hares in the snow, camouflaged in their winter coats. Native to Britain, mountain hares moult from brown to white or partially white in winter, depending on temperature. With a local expert, Rosamund climbed a valley in the Scottish Cairngorms, ‘at times through knee-deep snow’, until they came across a couple of hares that allowed them to approach within photographic range. Their mottled, snow-dusted coats echoed the colours of the snow-covered hillside. For several hours, Rosamund lay on the ground in freezing temperatures, observing the hares snuggled into their forms (shallow depressions) as fine snow blew over them and rime coated their pelts. In the late afternoon, the hares finally became active and started to feed, scraping the snow from the heather and then nibbling the shoots. Positioning herself so that she was looking up a gentle incline directly at one hare, Rosamund captured its determined scrabbling in a head-on portrait.

Natural Frame by Morkel Erasmus, South Africa

Morkel could hear every rumble. He could even smell the elephants. But his view was limited to the viewing slit of a cramped bunker sunk into the ground beside a remote waterhole in Namibia’s Etosha National Park. Giraffes, zebras and kudu wandered in and out of view, but the elephants were right in front, sometimes so close that his view was blocked. Morkel used black and white to place the emphasis on the composition. His moment came when a mother framed his shot with her legs just as her calf walked into view framing a giraffe. Having caught his ‘dream moment’, Morkel put down his camera and just sat and enjoyed the ‘bliss’ of watching wild animals taking their turn to drink from this life-giving waterhole.

These are just two of the ten wonderful Wildlife Photographs which can be seen in the

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015

All the best Jan