Brock of the Peaks: Badgers in the Peak District
It truly is a privilege to see a badger family wake up and go about the start of their day. First, a parent sniffing the air at the edge of the sett to get a sense of what’s to greet them outside, then a few tentative steps outside to forage for worms. A first follower will eventually be emboldened to join them and perhaps even roll in the dry ground to scratch any itches or remove any unwanted parasites. Before too long there are four or five badgers orbiting the sett, sometimes travelling at speed and knocking into one another as they get more active in gathering their breakfast.
Their day ahead was our sunset. I joined Francis Taylor on one of his excellent workshops and we positioned ourselves not far downwind from the sett and settled in to try to remain as still and quiet as possible to have the best chance to capture these legends of the British countryside in action.
This was my second badger workshop. It had surprised me first time around how close you could be to the sett, but remain undetected by the badgers who rely far more on their senses of hearing and smell than their eyesight which is relatively poor. First time around I wasn’t as quiet as I hoped to be, mainly due to a savage attack of hay fever which left me to sneezing at inopportune moments, not conducive to badger observation.
About the European Badger
Archaeological evidence suggests our subject (meles meles) has been a staple of the British countryside since the last Ice Age, making them one one of the oldest continuously surviving native mammals on record.
The word "badger" however is relatively young. It only entered common English usage in the sixteenth century, where observers noted that the animal's boldly striped face resembled the badge or sash worn by household servants to denote who they worked for. Or perhaps it came from the French word ‘becheur’, meaning digger. Far older is their original name ‘brock’, which traces its lineage to *brokkos* in Proto-Brythonic — the ancient language group of western Britain — evolving into *brocc* in Old Irish and *broch* in Welsh. In the place names of England, you’ll find brock featuring commonly: Brockwell, Brockholes,
Culture, Folklore, and the Spirit World
The badger has long held cultural and spiritual fascination as a creature who, whilst not uncommon, was rarely seen and lived in an underground world we cannot follow. Mythology across the British Isles frequently places the badger as a guide taking us from one realm to another.
In Celtic tradition, the badger was associated with wisdom, protection, and the earth itself. The goddess Brigantia, whose festival of Imbolc falls at the beginning of February, claimed the badger as her sacred animal totem — a symbol of new life stirring beneath the frozen ground, the first emergence from winter darkness. In Welsh mythology, a badger appears as a companion and guide in the otherworldly narrative of Pwyll's courtship of Rhiannon, navigating the space between the mortal and spirit realms. Irish mythology takes this further, casting badgers as shapeshifters: kinsmen of the legendary figure Tadg, able to move between animal and human form.
Folk superstitions let to demand for various badger parts - a tuft of hair worn in a bag made from black cat skin to ward off witchcraft, teeth as good luck charms for gamblers, while the penis bone of a badger was sometimes given as a wedding gift to encourage fertility.
My earliest and most treasured encounter with badgers was through Kenneth Grahame's Badger in ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ Badger is the sensible and calm dispenser of wisdom— an ancient and solitary keeper of deep knowledge. Beatrix Potter's Tommy Brock, on the other hand, offered a darker counterpoint: cunning, dangerous and untrustworthy. With echoes of ancient cultural associations, these two portrayals allow you to lean one way or another in your view of the badger’s identity.
Bovine Tuberculosis
These contrasts echo in the badger’s much contested role as a vector of bovine tuberculosis. Bovine TB is a chronic and costly disease that continues to affect cattle herds across England, devastating farming families and generating years of fractious political debate. Different views on the extent to which badgers spread TB, and what the best response is, has led to different practice across the UK.
The Derbyshire Wildlife Trust launched the UK's largest badger vaccination programme in 2014, operating across multiple sites within the Peak District National Park, partnering with the National Trust and a network of volunteers who trap, vaccinate, and release badgers. The vaccine does not cure infection but can prevent badgers from developing the disease, reducing the likelihood of transmission to cattle. The Trust has argued that vaccination is not only more humane than culling but considerably more cost-effective — estimated at around sixty times cheaper per badger than the licensed culling operations rolled out across much of southwest England.
The badger, already persecuted for centuries — first through badger-baiting (outlawed in 1835 but still occasionally practised illegally) and later through gassing operations in the 1960s and 1970s — remains one of the most legally protected yet most persecuted mammals in Britain.
Despite this, as it has for aeons prior, the badger persists. Broad paw-scratches on old ash trees, distinctive black-and-white hairs snagged on wire fences, the spoil heaps of sandy soil that mark a working sett on a south-facing bank are all more commonly seen than the badger itself, but remind us of the presence of this iconic species.
The badger is not simply a conservation issue or a farming problem. It is part of the deep tissue of this landscape — present in its folk memory and woven into its old names.
The Hare: England’s Most Bewitching Wild Creature
In England, the brown hare (*Lepus europaeus*) has haunted the landscape for millennia, and the hold it has on the imagination remains as strong as ever. I went to rural Lincolnshire in search of these beguiling creatures with the optimistic hope they would be in a co-operative mood.
Arriving spectacularly early for my appointment in a hide in the corner of an arable farm, I wandered the local countryside looking for something to photograph before the hares were expecting me. It was a beautiful sunny day in May with a moderate breeze that was sending ripples through fields of wheat that looked, to my admittedly untrained eye, ready for harvesting.
I tried to capture the movement of the wheat by using a slower shutter speed of one to two seconds, made possible with a neutral density filter (the big stopper) to dramatically reduce the light coming in. I used a tripod and a remote release button (best £9 I ever spent) to eliminate camera movement. I’m not a landscape photographer, but I was quite pleased with the result, and made a mental note to try the filter on coastal scenes or waterfalls.
Anyway, back to the hares, and a short natural history.
The brown hare is not native to Britain in a deeply historical sense; it is thought to have been introduced by Iron Age peoples or the Romans, yet it has woven itself so thoroughly into the English countryside that it feels aboriginal. Larger than a rabbit, with ears tipped in black and hind legs built for extraordinary speed, a hare can reach 45 mph — fast enough to outrun most dogs. Unlike rabbits, hares live entirely above ground, sheltering in shallow depressions in the grass called ‘forms', their fur pressed flat against the earth.
Their breeding behaviour is remarkable. Brown hares are famously promiscuous and almost continuously reproductive from January through August. Watching on from the hide I saw several leverets, which are born fully furred and open-eyed, scattered across the field and only sporadically visited by their mother just before dusk. They are creatures designed by evolution to survive on alertness and speed alone.
Once abundant across England’s farmlands, the brown hare has regrettably declined significantly since the mid-twentieth century, largely due to intensive agriculture, the loss of hedgerows, and early silage cuts that sadly kill the leverets. Today they are an amber-listed species of conservation concern, though they can still be found in good numbers across the arable East and the chalk downlands in the South. The farm the hide was on had an impressive approach to biodiversity encouraging a wide range of habitat and plant development that catered for a range of mammals and birds, and was fortunately home to a sizeable group of charismatic hares.
Character
Hares do not behave like prey animals are supposed to. You can divide them into sitters or runners, although I imagine each individual hare is fully prepared to do either according to its own criteria and its whim at the time. A hare will sit motionless for extraordinary lengths of time, then vanish in a single bounding stride. They play. They fight. In early spring, females box away over-eager males, rearing up on their haunches in the open field — the origin of the phrase ‘mad as a March hare’.
I witnessed this behaviour as I was fortunate to be photographing a hare playing by a nearby gate who, seemingly apropos of nothing, sprung an incredible height in the air for an unspecified purpose.
Spiritual Associations
The hare is one of the oldest sacred animals in England. Boudicca, Queen of the ancient Iceni tribe whose territory included modern day Norfolk and who rebelled (unsuccessfully) against the conquering Romans in AD60, is said to have released a hare before battle as an omen. In folk tradition, hares were associated with witches — women were said to transform into hares at night to steal milk from neighbouring farms, and a silver bullet was the only remedy.
The three hares motif — three hares running in a circle, sharing ears so that each has two though only three exist between them — appears in Devon churches from the medieval period and may represent the Trinity, or simply the pagan mysteries the church absorbed. The hare is also deeply linked to Eostre, the ancient Anglo-Saxon spring goddess of spring and the dawn whose name gave us Easter, connecting the creature to renewal, the moon, and the fertile dark.
Just Chewin’
If you are interested in photographing hares, check out the booking page as well as Tom Robinson’s other hides.
This blog and photographs and dedicated to my good friend Emily Hare, who maintains she has no connection to these wonderful creatures.
Vantage Point - Emotions and Perspective
Photographers come to learn that their relationship to their subject affects the emotions and feelings the viewer has upon looking at their pictures. Wildlife photographers probably know the frustrations this can cause better than most. A wedding photographer might ask the happy couple to adopt a certain pose and look in a certain direction and be confident they will at least try to comply. A landscape photographer who knows the weather and the area can arrive at their scene at the right time with an idea of what they will be met with. Wildlife photography often requires patience for your subject to even appear (or not), let alone behave in a way that allows you to capture the emotion you seek to communicate.
I wanted to understand more systematically what impact the position of the camera relative to the subject might have on the viewer. I wrote this blog to set this out mainly for my own learning, but if anyone else stumbles across this I hope it’s helpful and if you have anything on this subject to add, contest or question please do contribute in the comments section below.
I was motivated to write this in the drive up to Scotland to photograph adders, where I was taking the time to catch up on Richard Bernabe’s podcast – Beyond The Lens. Richard hosts a range of talented nature photographers and explorers and discusses their philosophy on photography and creative culture; I highly recommend you listen. The subject of the episode in question was a review of the book ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ by John Szarcowski, published in 1966. Szarkowski was a man who spent much more time looking at photographs than taking them.
In the podcast Richard discusses, amongst other things, John’s analysis of the impact of distance, vertical position and angle relative to the subject on the audience’s response to a photograph. Let’s cover each of these in turn, starting with distance:
Near - if your subject is near this creates immersion and intimacy, perhaps even unease or drama and confrontation. Here the photographer is up close and part of the scene, often impacting it by their presence.
The middle-distance - this lends itself more to neutral, impartial observation as if you were recording the subject for a documentary.
Far - the subject being far away creates a sense of isolation and extraction. The subject’s context is illuminated. The intimacy and drama of close ups is replaced with calm.
The three images taken from our honeymoon in Namibia illustrate this. The close-up zebra is clearly aware of my presence and, as the photographer, I am part of the scene. The texture of the dry ground and trees in the Dead Vlei in the middle distance is presented more as documentary, dispassionately presenting the scene. Finally, we lose most of the detail of the subject in the final picture of the iconic Onyx, replaced with the context of their surroundings and the openness of the space they occupy.
Next we’ll look at vertical position:
From above - shooting down on your subject portrays your dominance over them, with the effect that you are condescendinhg to your subject, who is diminished and can appear vulnerable.
Level - shooting level with your subject portrays senses of equality and directness – the subject is met on its own terms with dignity and mutual respect.
From below - shooting upwards towards your subject is an exaltation of them - presenting them as monumental, heroic, sometimes threatening.
The pictures of the water vole shows the difference between execution and intention! I didn’t want to portray the vole as being diminished and vulnerable, but it is presented this way because I was standing above it shooting down. I wanted to shoot level, but that’s difficult when photographing a creature that dwells sunken in the banks of streams. I would love to get a level shot of the vole swimming towards me that would present the vole in a stronger stance like the grey heron in the middle picture. In the picture on the right, this goshawk in Namibia is presented as powerful and even has a threatening air about them.
Finally let’s look at the angle of the camera to the subject on a horizontal plane:
Head on - locked eye contact portrays direct confrontation, and an acknowledgement of the photographer by the subject - an encounter.
Behind - here the subject is moving away from the photographer, perhaps unaware of their presence or perhaps refusing to engage with them. It can create a sense of mystery. If done well it can present the viewer as following a subject whose independence is highlighted.
To the side - by swinging round on a horizontal access to approach the subject from a side angle the photographer portrays a sense of observation, lessening their impact and participation in the photograph.
The first picture of this handsome red fox pictured in Buckinghamshire hopefully speaks for itself. A picture from behind is a relatively rare occurrence in wildlife photography. It’s quite easy to get a picture from behind your subject, particularly if you’ve accidentally startled your intended subject, but it’s rarely a picture that you end up keeping. A picture from behind could work if what the subject was looking at was an interesting place the subject was heading to and the viewer could almost picture themself following the animal to their destination. I have seen this work much better with travel photography with human subjects, particularly in religious or spiritual settings. In this final picture, the little owl pictured side-on gives a sense of being observed, where we wonder what his or her next move will be.
Hopefully this serves as a useful reminder to be aware of and be intentional about your position as a photographer relative to the subject, and consider whether the feeling your adopted position will create for the viewer is the feeling you intend and a feeling that suits the subject. Please do comment below if you have thoughts, additions or anything to contest about what i’ve set out here - and do check out Richard Bernabe’s podcast if you’re a keen photographer or explorer.
The UK’s Only Venomous Snake
Seldom seen, but still making its home amongst the heather and bracken in places across the UK, the adder (Vipera berus) is one of our most fascinating, beautiful and misunderstood residents. I went to Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland in search of Britain’s only venomous snake where they have held out for thousands of years, although their numbers are now believed to be in decline.
I have long held a wariness and fascination for adders, ever since my Dad warned me that the compost heap in our house in the Cotswolds was home to a family of adders including a small collection of adderlings! This intrigued and terrified me and I, perhaps for the good of all concerned, never ventured too near the compost heap again.
My wariness is in keeping with my ancestors; the word adder is derived from the old English ‘naedre’ meaning ‘serpent' or ‘creeping thing.’ Folklore suggests shepherds and farmers had long been wary of their bite and the damage it might cause them and their livestock. A bite from an adder is unlikely to be fatal, but would likely result in hospitalisation and certainly form the low point of all but the worst days out. However, the adder’s reputation for danger is undeserved. Placid and cautious by nature, adders are more likely to seek shelter and avoid contact with humans as soon as they are aware of our presence.
Adders are very hard to spot, they may occasionally be seen basking in the morning sunshine after they emerge from hibernation from February. I had the privilege of photographing this adder courtesy of a workshop organised by Alan McFadyen in a quiet spot amongst a tranquil sea of bluebells in the Dumfries and Galloway sunshine in Scotland in May 2026.
In the photographs you can see the adder flicking its tongue to analyse its surroundings. It uses its forked tongue to collect moisture and scent particles in the air and on the ground to sense the direction scents are coming from.
I used a Canon R5 mirrorless camera with a 100-500mm telephoto lens. You might be surprised by how small adders are, perhaps only around 70cm long and only a few cm wide, weighing not more than 200g. I was normally shooting at 500mm to get a full frame shot without placing myself closer to the adder than either of us wanted.
It was an experience I’ll never forget to come face to face with the mysterious visitor to my childhood compost heap and experience their beauty and placid nature.
Adder taking stock of its surroundings
Little Owls in Wychbold
Thanks for having a look at my latest blog post! This time I've been down in Wychbold near Droitwich in the Midlands photographing little owls.
Little owls, aka owls of Athena / Minerva, are spread across most of mainland Europe, Asia and the north coast of Africa. They're small, as the name suggests, around 20cm in height and survive on a diet of insects, worms and small mammals such as mice. I was photographing them in early June when the adults were busy doing trips to and from the nest with worms and mice to feed the chicks.
The nest was set up in this beautiful old oak tree, on Brine Pit farm , with the hide just 10 metres or so away. I would recommend the hides for a visit. They're easy to get to being just off the M5 on a beautiful , peaceful farm surrounded in abundant nature with a selection of rustic old farm buildings.
The little owl wasn't the own bird interested in the worms that morning. Alongside a number of jackdaws, an attentive adult common woodpecker was feeding his large fluffy chick.
It was a perfect day for photography with beautiful morning sunshine through clouds illuminating the subjects who were out close to the hide constantly. The birds were very co-operative subjects, with beautiful backgrounds behind them. I think I broke my record for the number of pictures in a single day, I came away with around 4,000. It was one of those days where you know getting home and sorting through the pictures worth keeping is going to be a mammoth job!
I was shooting with a Canon R5, with the RF100-500mm lens. I took the pictures at the lowest aperture I could when zoomed in at between 350-500mm, which was usually f/7.1, to blur out the background. I tried to do a few in-flight shots at a faster shutter speed, although this was harder as the little owl tended to do very short, fast flights without any indication he was about to set off.
Anyway, I hope you like the pictures. If you have any recommendations for wildlife photography hides or other experiences in the UK please do let me know below in the comments. My next shoot is going to be seeing a badger sett in the peak district next month.
Who Doesn’t Love A Toad?
I've always loved frogs and toads and newts. We used to have a pond in our garden where I grew up in Wiltshire where we had Great Crested Newts that took up residence and I've loved amphibious pond life ever since.
Common Toads actually spend very little time in the water, and generally will live in secluded, damp, shady patches of woods for most of the year only seeking out their ponds when it's time to mate. This usually happens at the end of March or beginning of April when toads will gather in vast numbers to mate.
I went with Francis Taylor, who runs some excellent wildlife photography workshops, to check out a few spots near Sheffield where they're known to mate. After some failures where the mating activity had already taken place and the toads had retreated to their woods, we found a reservoir where the toads were abundant.
It was staggering how much toad spawn was there. As you can see in the pictures below toad spawn forms in long strands which were everywhere across the floor of the shallow edges of the reservoir. If you'd have stretched out all the spawn (which obviously is not condoned) it would have been many football pitch lengths. The underwater pictures were taken on my phone , in a plastic watertight case so that it could be activated underwater. This is not the most high-tech solution, and most of the pictures I took were terrible , but a few were acceptable and show off just how much spawn the toads create.
All of this is great news for the birds. The male toads become fixated upon mating and seem to be in a trance. They cling on to backs of the much bigger females they intend to mate, but in some cases you get multiple males all grabbing on to the same female and forming a 'toad ball'. You can see one above. Sadly this has the effect sometimes of drowning the female toad under the weight of the volume of males. In these numbers the toads are often easy pickings for gulls and other birds which was evident by the toad bones scattered across rocks amongst the bird droppings. The birds will likely get another feast as the eggs develop into tadpoles and toadlets and then make their exit from the water.
It was brilliant to see the toads doing so well, reproducing in vast numbers and I'll try and be back next year to witness the spectacle again. Who would want to miss that?
White-tailed Eagles around the Isle of Mull
I’m just back from an amazing trip to the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland where I’ve been photographing White-tailed Eagles, aka Sea Eagles. They are a magnificent sight up close, with a wingspan over two metres and displaying amazing agility for a large bird, adjusting their position to catch prey. They are the UK’s largest bird of prey and Mull is a great home for these birds. White-tailed Eagles went extinct in the UK in the early 20th century and the population in the UK now is from reintroduced birds. Disturbing the birds is illegal because of their conservation status.
We went out to sea from Ulva Ferry and had six different birds visiting the boat, some on multiple occasions. Each fish they consumed is about 100g, so only a small contribution to the diet a White-tail needs of about 1kg or more of food per day, so the boats don’t replace the need for the eagles to hunt for food. In fact, as fishing has declined in the area this replaces, to some extent, food they would have got from fishing boats.
Mull is a rare haven for wildlife in the UK; my wife saw two Golden Eagles as soon as she dropped me off for the ferry , as well as an otter which are reasonably common around the shoreline (I missed that one too). I couldn’t complain too much as I was lucky with how many eagles we had the opportunity to photograph. I went out with Gary Jones who organises regular trips to see the Eagles, on the Lady Jayne run by Mull Charters. If you come to Mull you should also check out the Highland Cows that hangout on the beach! We saw some at Lochbuie
The birds dived for fish thrown a short distance from the boat. I shot with a 100-500mm Canon R5 on a fast shutter speed and with the aperture wide open on high speed continuous plus. I was shooting mainly about 200-250 as the birds are so quick it’s very easy to cut off one of those massive wings when you’re zoomed in too closely. When I got back on dry land I found id taken a few thousand pictures, with many more out of focus than in, and many hours of reviewing and deleting pictures on my hands. Here are a few of the decent ones, including two available on the site if you’re after a framed picture.
If you’re tempted to come up to Mull to photograph the Eagles I’d recommend coming up for a week, there’s quite a few great places to stay (try looking on Air BnB) and some nice restaurants. Reach out to me on my comments page if you want any recommendations. I regret not having long enough to go out looking for otters, (there are people on the island who can help you find them) and to head up Ben More looking for Golden Eagles who are also commonly seen on the isle.
Hope you enjoyed the blog post. Let me know if you’ve tried photographing these wonderful birds before and if you have any tips to share on getting the perfect shot! Check out more of my pictures and keep in touch by following me on Instagram.
Buzzards at Berwick Bassett
Blog post about my trip to Berwick Bassett in Wiltshire to photograph buzzards
Hello and thanks for checking out my blog. In this first post: How I started photographing wildlife, what I've learned so far, and some notes from a brilliant buzzard shoot.
I shoot with a Canon R5 and a 100-500mm Canon lens. I got it about six months ago and am still working out how to get the best out of it. I've done workshops with local experts who gave me tips and tricks to adjust the controls and settings to get the most out of the camera, and am definitely now finding it much easier to keep the subject in focus. In my experience knowledge is more important than getting the best kit - and don't underestimate how much time it takes to learn how to use and get value from the functions you've invested in. Also - you never stop learning so please share your best tips.
I have been photographing wildlife seriously for about four years. What got me started was a visit to Tom Way's fox photography hide in Buckinghamshire. I have always loved being out in the wild, and photographing from a hide lets you observe nature in a whole new way - plus you get to enjoy a level of peace and quiet that most other hobbies can't match.
There's plenty of peace and quiet to be had in rural Wiltshire, where I grew up, and that's where I headed earlier this month - to Dave White's farm in the village of Berwick Bassett near Avebury, to photograph Buzzards. Luxury isn't necessarily a word you'd associate with wildlife photography - but this hide was one of the most comfortable I've visited, with pleasant seating, heating and brewing facilities. I was initially wary of photographing through glass, being used to hides with a hole for your lens, but this worked just fine and I'm not sure the glass had any impact on the pictures at all.
I was lucky that the buzzards were visiting all day. There was plenty to admire as five or six of these hefty (by UK standards!) and elegant predators posed, helpfully, on posts, or competed with one another for food. I had to turn up the ISO quite high to freeze the image, particularly in the early hours but found that Lightroom's Denoise function removed the graininess that resulted. It was well worth the long drive from Manchester, and I was really happy with the pictures I came home with.
