Camley Street Natural Park

I was slated to visit the British Wildlife Centre today, however as luck would have it, I had my atm card sucked up by the machine as some idiot stuffed a slip of paper into the card slot :( Grr....

Only have a few pounds in the wallet, so I trudged home and searched online for any close by parks to visit. A hit turned up, Camley Street Natural Park. It is a relatively small place, you can probably complete a quick walk around in less than a quarter of an hour.



The amazing thing is its location. It's barely a 5 minute walk from King's Cross/St Pancras station. It's just between a waterway and the train lines. Just stepping in the gate, and you don't feel in the city anymore.



There were a few Mallards around, and as you can see, with chicks :) I also spotted a dusky moor hen, and several coots. The pond area was pretty alive with insects, I took many shots of Damselflies and Dragon flies with the 300/4 + TC14E combo. Sadly, as I was in a very low position, I had no support. So... all the shots are now in the trashbin. Damn it, I want my 300/4 with a stabilizer :( In any case, I still got a few reasonably usable shots (i.e. not going to go larger than 8x12), like this:



Most of the time there I spent with the insects though, mainly hoverflies and bees.






The bees and hoverflies were curiously mostly found on specific plants, very interesting.

I'd like to say more about the park, for example it has a area set aside for beetle larvae to grow. There was also an area set aside for people to look logs to see "minibeats", like millipedes and centipedes, etc.



However, I was kinda like distracted by the lack of wolves running around central London available for photographers, so I headed home ;-)