Camera love....

Remember {{ this post }} way back in April?
Well, yesterday was the day when my newest best friend was put to the test. Thankfully, it wasn't too bad of a day weather-wise, in fact I would say at times is was TOO freakin' hot. And why is it that the sun is at its most fiercest and no refreshing breezes are about, when you walk UP a hill ?!!?? As soon as you get to the top and start the descent, breezes appear from out of nowhere and the sun hides behind clouds..go figure.

But I digress.

The Isle of Wight is famous for being one of the very few places in the UK, where you would still be able to find the {{ Red Squirrell }}. Sod's law dictates though that in my life time I will never see one....Mr P spots them all the time and even his sister and mum when they came over the other month, saw one as soon as they walked towards the little East Cowes park....hmpfhhh.

picture by Ray Eye, taken from Wikipedia

So we thought it would be nice to go to {{ Parkhurst Forest }}, where you will find an abundance of Reddies - unless I am part of your group, in which case you will see anything but...

But, there were many other things we saw - and thanks to my new zoom lens, I got some amazing pictures. Brace yourselves for a very picture-heavy post. As always - if you want to see some of the pictures enlarged, just click on them to open.

First stop - elephANTs...seriously those suckers were HUGE, I have never seen ants this big before and quite frankly, I never want to see them again. The forest floor was alive with thousands of them in places and it was quite interesting (from a distance) to see what they were up to.
House move, much ??? Look at the size of the twig compared to the ant...

The next thing we saw was a crow attacking a huge bird of prey - we couldn't quite make out what it was but think it could have been a hawk. They were quite far away and even with my zoom I only got as close as this. Anyone know what bird of prey that may have been?

Moving on, I got terribly excited that now I could get some super fun shots of butterflies, basking in the sun. Usually they bugger off as soon as you get close to them. Now I could stand way back and got fabulous close ups.

We even had a couple of butterflies starting their mating process right in front of us (the swines....), at least I think that's what they were doing...

The only thing that I didn't consider before setting off was that I should have also taken my normal lense for the shots that don't require such a strong zoom...when Mr P wanted to take a picture of me, he had to walk towards the neighbouring country to get the cam working, and vice versa. So we only really bothered with two pictures this time.

After a straight four hours of walking, we collapsed on some benches in the park and found this little fella took a hike on Mr P's shoulders...aaaawwwww

By then my legs were really hurting, so we made a quick walk towards the Red Squirrel hide. Needless to say none of the Reddies showed up and we walked back home, to enjoy an evening with a BBQ on our Phase #1 balcony :)