Gelli Hir Wood is a prime example of a wet woodland and is owned and managed by the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales. I always find woodland difficult to photograph as there is a sense of chaos to a woodland. As a result it is difficult to find pleasing compositions when in the wood. Most views of woodlands are taken of the edge of the wood as seen here, but every now and then you come across the work of other photographers that show it can be done and that I need to try harder. There are usually a few woodland/forest images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition that I find useful to learn from.
Gelli Hir wood is quite quiet, with the occasional dog walker, but it is surprisingly quiet in terms of wildlife. I always thought that the pond would attract more waterfowl than it seems to, plus there seems to be less than in the past. I’m not sure if this is due to the reed beds expanding and leaving less open water in the pond or as the pond is filled from run off water from the nearby farm and fields, there is an issue with the water quality. In the past I have seen Kingfisher, moorhen, mallard, tawny owl, buzzard and woodcock but recently I have seen very little. Gelli Hir will always be one of my places to visit as it has provided me with my best British wildlife experience to date. After 3 months of hard work?I was lucky to reach a stage where a vixen would sleep 2 metres from me while her 3 cubs jumped over my outstretched feet, and badgers would wonder through on their way to feed. Unfortunately my photographs of this were poor due to it all happening in a very dark location, plus they were taken on my first digital SLR and they seem to have vanished into nowhere with the transfer of data to various hard drives and new computers etc. One day I will redo this project, as long as the animals are still there. The really interesting this with this location was that the vixen was sharing a part of a badgers set that wasn’t well used, and seemed to be tolerated well by the badgers.
Due to the visual chaos of the woodland I retreated into my usual mode of picking out detail images. Apart from the colour, this tree trunk caught my eye as it had a great twisted pattern running up the trunk. Unfortunately to see this fully in an image I needed to use a wider view. This then introduced more distracting elements into the photo, which in turn distracted from the trunk. I reached this compromise image, but the full twisting effect of the trunk cannot be seen unfortunately.
