One thing I miss, having moved from the Highlands to the Peak District, is the wildlife: sea eagles and otters all seen regularly from my garden. But that’s not to say the moors of Derbyshire are devoid of life and it hasn’t taken me long to find a few favourite spots in which to wander. Red grouse are everywhere and in summer curlews and lapwings will return to add music to the moors. But what I didn’t expect to find, just a few miles from home, was a mammal that was more associated with the mountains of my old haunt of Knoydart: the mountain hare.

In seven years I only saw a handful of hares in the Knoydart hills but here in the Peak District I have seen dozens in just a few months. So why are they here? They are not present anywhere else in the Pennines. The answer is an unlikely one; the Victorians enjoyed shooting things, preferably fast moving birds like red grouse, of which there are plenty in the Peak District, but the appeal of blasting these birds out of the sky waned; they wanted to try something different. Mountain hares were fast and offered the perfect challenge. The problem was, there were no hares here – so they released some. One hundred years later the rifles have stopped firing and the hares are thriving.

Nevertheless, they may now face a new threat. Mountain hares moult in the autumn, changing colour from grey/brown to pure white: camouflage against the winter snows. But if the changing climate results in snow falling later in the year, or not at all, the hares will find themselves far from camouflaged, their white fur standing out against a dark hillside. If, however, winters get longer and snowier this could increase the range of habitat for these animals – decreasing solar activity and a shutting down of the Gulf Stream would suit mountain hares just fine.

Mountain hares moult rapidly. The shot of the hare above was taken at the end of October; you can see the pelage starting to turn white in places. The shot of the hare at the top of this post was taken in mid-December. Despite freezing temperatures there was no snow lie and I spotted him and the rest of his band from half a mile away. A buzzard or fox would spot them even sooner.

Good for me though; makes it much easier to track them down, although it would be nice to get a shot of a white hare in the snow. I’ll be back after Christmas trying to do just that.

It’s been so quiet on this website there have been tumbleweeds floating past my last blog post. I’ve got a good excuse though: my family and I have been busy upping sticks and moving from the sticks – Knoydart – to the environs of a metropolis – Manchester.

Why the hell would someone who loved the mountains and the sea do such a reckless thing? Well, it’s all for the greater good as I start a one-year postgrad course in Wildlife Documentary Production at the University of Salford. I’ve been a wildlife geek and a photography bore since I was a kid so this is such a great opportunity for me.

And as for Knoydart; I’ve been there seven years and as Dave the crofter told me as we boarded the last ferry to Mallaig with a lorry load of consumer crap, “Knoydart tends to get a hold of you. You’ll be back.”

Yes, it was a wrench leaving such a beautiful place so I’ve put together this short video. For me it’s catharsis. I don’t know what it might be for you but whatever it is please share it around.

One of the pleasures of the last few months has been listening to the radio hearing how wet this spring and summer have been: record breaking rainfall in Wales and floods in England. For once, the west coast of Scotland has been spared the soggy deluge and we’ve been basking in sunshine. Okay, we’ve had some wet days but on the whole the waters of Loch Nevis have been sparkling in the sunshine.

At times the sun, so high in the sky, has been too strong for good landscape photography but catch it early or late in the day and you can get some beautiful light. For about ten minutes every evening, just before the sun sets, this hill, across the loch from my house, glows red. Its rugged topography is picked out perfectly by the sinking shadows.

Tomorrow is the summer solstice – the longest day – so it seems fitting to share an image of the last light of the day at gone 10 o’clock in the evening. Won’t be long before it’s dark at four!

Conditions were perfect: a good aurora forecast, a good weather forecast and a new moon, thus a nice dark sky. The Northern Lights, or Aurora borealis had already been seen in parts of Scotland a couple of weeks before but not in Knoydart which had been sitting under oppressive dark clouds for months. I’d been meaning to get a timelapse of the aurora all winter and wasn’t going to let this chance pass me by. So, I cycled five miles with a bike trailer laden with camera gear, down jacket, flask of tea and some of my wife’s home-made flapjack, up to “Doune Top” near Airor where you can get a clear view over the back end of Skye to Torridon in the north.

Within minutes of getting there I could see a faint green light on the horizon. It was starting! A few frantic minutes of setting the camera up for the timelapse and then I sat down with a cup of tea and watched the lights glow. Pulses of intense colour slowly moved across the sky and pale green strokes of green rose into the atmosphere. It was eerie but beautiful. I sat there for nearly four hours, as frost developed on me and the camera. It wasn’t a patch on the aurorae I had seen in Lapland a few times, where deep, pulsating curtains of colour swayed right overhead. This was low on the horizon but to see it on my home patch made it pretty special.

So what causes the aurora? Every now and then the sun spews out a mass of highly charged particles: a coronal mass ejection. When they hit the earth’s magnetic field they are drawn to the poles where they react with the earth’s atmosphere and produce light. I’m no astrophysicist but that’s my understanding anyway. In days gone by, the indigenous people of northern Canada and other high latitude regions such as Siberia and Lapland had their own interpretations of the lights: dancing spirits of dead children, pathways to heaven and omens of war, to name just a few.

This video shows 75 minutes of the aurora condensed into five seconds. I would have had more to show you but the frost on the lens ruined the image. This may have been the last chance to see the aurora in Scotland this spring but with the sun’s activity set to peak in 2013, hopefully we should see a few more from the autumn onwards. Keep your eyes on the skies.

Last week the sun spewed out an enormous solar flare which we were told would light up the northern skies with a fantastic auroral display. The skies above Knoydart were, as usual, hidden by a thick fug of grey cloud so I hopped on a boat and then drove over 100 miles to Findhorn on the east side of Scotland where the sky was clear. I parked up by the sand dunes and set my camera facing north over the Moray Firth, hoping to capture a timelapse of charged particles bouncing about in the upper atmosphere – the northern lights.

I’ve seen it a few times before, in Lapland. When you get a good show, as I did, it’s as incredible as everyone says. The best show I ever had was when I was snowshoeing across the Arctic tundra in Sarek National Park in Sweden. The whole sky pulsated with curtains of red and green. I was with a friend who never stopped talking but even he stood there open mouthed for ten minutes not knowing what to say.

Back on the beach at Findhorn there were a few clouds scudding by but it was pretty clear. Jupiter and Venus lit up the skies over Inverness but there wasn’t so much as a squirt of northern light. So what do you do when you’re standing alone on a beach, in the dark, for four hours, in the middle of the night, hoping to film the northern lights when there’s no northern lights to see? You take night shots of the beach instead. Here’s a few from that night.

Oh, the following night the northern lights did put in a show but I was back in Knoydart under that perpetual west coast cloud so I didn’t see a thing. My advice if you want to see the northern lights? Go to Lapland.

Findhorn Beach and steps at night

Steps to Findhorn Beach at night

Ghost at Findhorn

Findhorn Dunes at night

Findhorn Beach by night

After what feels like three months of solid rain and cloud, we finally have a little bit of high pressure tickling the west coast of Scotland, teasing us with clear skies and dry, frosty mornings. So, I’m making the most of it and having a dabble at some timelapses of stars. Click on the video to see the results.

The first half is probably underexposed and the second half overexposed but I’m getting there. It’s great to see the stars again. We have some of the best night skies in Britain here – when it stops raining. It’s a bit annoying that last week’s aurora borealis didn’t coincide with these few clear nights (I only got the briefest of glimpses of the northern lights through a break in the clouds) but I’m not complaining – well, okay, I am. But it’s great to see the stars again.

If you look closely you can see a couple of shooting stars in the second timelapse. And if you’re really paying attention you’ll spot that I’ve deliberately aimed the camera at Polaris, the pole star, around which all the other stars rotate; makes for a pretty picture. You can see Ursa Major (the Great Bear or ‘Big Saucepan’ as I knew it as a kid) tilted up onto its handle on the right-hand side.

For anyone who wants to have a bash at this themselves here are the techy specs (if you are not a camera nerd look away now): 30 sec exposure, intervalometer set to take a frame every 35 secs, f4.5, 12mm lens, tripod (of course). On the first timelapse I used an ISO of 1250 and on the second 6400, hence the difference in brightness – and noise. In an ideal world where I have a few thousand pounds of cash to spare I would buy an even wider angled lens which I could knock down to f1.4, or something silly like that, and so avoiding the need for a high ISO number and associated “noise”.

By the way, if anyone knows a sure-fire method of avoiding condensation on the camera when leaving it outside in the cold for hours on end then let me know.