Today is the twenty first day of my photography challenge – Adventures in Photography
It is amazing how many grey days we have had this March. I didn’t really notice the weather as much until I set myself this challenge and getting interesting images in flat light has been a bit of a challenge.
Today I went back to the woods, to part of Rendlesham Forest that is just on my doorstep. I decided to explore a wet section of the wood which is marked as ‘Scotland Fens’ on the OS map. It is an open section of the forest through which the River Tang flows. For most of its journey through the trees the Tang is little more than a small stream but in Scotland Fens it opens out into a large marshy area characterised by boggy ground littered with dead trees, standing pools of water and vast expanses of bull rushes.
The trees surrounding this area are mostly silver birch and oak and were full of bird song today. I saw gold crests, long tailed tits and woodpeckers in the trees and even encountered a woodcock in the fens.
As I needed 21 images today I decided to split the challenge into 7 panels of 3 related images. The first panel shows the moss and lichens growing on and around a fallen tree stump.
The second panel shows some pine cones scattered at the based of a tree which had all been eaten, presumably by a squirrel. I loved the colours of the discarded pine seeds and needles which littered the floor.
The third panel shows some bracket fungus growing on an old silver birch stump – the colours and shapes of the brackets were lovely and the patterns that they formed all over the tree trunk were really interesting.
The fourth panel features a couple of trees that caught my eye – the one of the left is an oak, bent over and growing at a strange angle and the other two images show a silver birch growing in the woods just above the fens.
The next panel shows the trunks of some silver birch trees. I loved the different colours of the bark. Some trees were predominantly a bluish silver while other were more salmon coloured.
The sixth panel shows some primroses I found growing in a marshy section of the woods, and my final panel shows the fens themselves with the green waterways and some of the dead tree trunks. 
The fens is not somewhere I explore that often but today I was reminded how good it feels to immerse yourself in the natural world and just spend some time surrounded by the trees and the songs of the woodland birds.