First post - Bombus pratorum

Ok, so I haven't had a blog before, I've been feeling like I should have one though but have been puzzling over what I might talk about. I'm the sort of person who needs a purpose or a challenge. But then it came to me earlier. I've been managing our garden to try and encourage wildlife for a while, with a little bit of success. It's a completely standard suburban garden in SE kent, UK. As I've also recently acquired a reasonable camera, as a bit of an experiment I thought I'd see how many species of wildlife I can photograph in or from the garden. The idea is I try to post a new species everyday, at least when I can. It will be any species of plant or animal so long as it's wild (i.e. no garden plants allowed, although wild species which I've planted to attract wildlife do count). I'll keep running totals of the major groups just to see how they stack up over time. The only group that I currently have a list for birds, which stands at 42 species. Everything else will be new, as I've never taken enough interest to really note the species of bee, moth, fly, plant, butterfly, ant etc etc this should be quite interesting. Apart from anything it should get my knowledge of other animal and plant groups up to standard. I've no idea how long I can stretch this out for - a few months maybe? On days when I feel like posting but haven't managed a new species maybe I'll post something else, if I can think up anything else worth posting.


So to get the ball rolling, here's the first photo:















I'm fairly sure this species of Bumblebee is called Bombus pratorum. It was taken today (30/4/06) using a 180mm Sigma macro attached to a Canon 20D, f7.1, 1/500s, ISO200.

I snapped lot's of other species too today (partly what got me thinking about this challange), but of course I can't use any of those tomorrow...

So here's how the scores are stacking up after 1 day

Bumblebees - 1
Everything else - 0

J