The Lesser Spotted Woodpecker is the smallest and least common of the UK's three species of woodpecker. It is most often found in the tops of trees where it creeps along branches in search of insects. Found in England, but rare in the north. Absent from Scotland and Ireland. Its 'drumming' is much quieter and less vigorous than that of the Great Spotted Woodpecker; its presence is often only given away by this or their call.
The lesser spotted woodpecker is small in size, being not much bigger than a house sparrow. Males are black and white, with a red crown cap, and females are plain black and white. They both have a distinctive white ladder marking down their black back.
**Did you know?**
There are now believed to be less than 3,000 pairs breeding annually in the UK compared to nearly 45,000 greater spotted woodpeckers.
After seeing Steve McQueen in "Cycle World" magazine and then in the "Great Escape" I was a huge fan. This is a digital rendering of the man. Missing him!
(0.5 pen on 160mm x 125mm paper) This was a piece I recently did to mark my entrance into the mad world of NFTs after I created an account on OpenSea and uploaded work on there. I'll be auctioning some of them off to see if I can gain Ethereum for them. So, if you use Ethereum as a crypto-currency, do give my work a look: https://opensea.io/SkavArt
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
Ha Long Bay is a small bay on the west coast of the Gulf of Tonkin in the Northeastern Sea region of Vietnam, including the island waters of Ha Long city in Quang Ninh province.
Being the center of a large area with more or less similar elements in geology, geomorphology, landscape, climate and culture, with Bai Tu Long Bay in the northeast and Cat Ba archipelago in the southwest, Ha Long Bay is limited to an area of about 1,553 km², including 1,969 large and small islands, most of which are limestone islands, in which the core area of the bay has an area of 335 km² with a dense cluster of 775 islands. The tectonic history of the bay's limestone karst has spanned about 500 million years with very different paleo-geographical circumstances; and full karst evolution over 20 million years with a combination of factors such as thick limestone, hot and humid climate, and overall slow tectonic uplift. The combination of environment, climate, geology, geomorphology, has made Ha Long Bay become the convergence of biodiversity including tropical moist evergreen closed forest ecosystem and marine and coastal ecosystems. shoreline with many sub-ecosystems. 17 endemic plant species and about 60 endemic animal species have been discovered among thousands of flora and fauna inhabiting the bay.
