Wildlife video diary – highlights for August

This a short collection of wildlife, nature and landscape recordings, highlighting some of my favourite scenes for that month.
With autumn fast approaching, this month I wanted to film some of the last few butterflies of the season. While it is nice to find the rarer species I wanted to include some of the better known butterflies such as the Common Blue, Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Painted Lady and Brimstone. I came across several Common Blues mating and a few Brown Argus butterflies. There were a good number of Migrant Hawker dragonflies as well as Common Darters. More of a challenge was a Grass snake as it swam upstream, as were the Little Terns on the beach which kept their distance. Thankfully the Black-tailed Godwits were less wary and I was able to film several males still displaying their colourful summer plumage. The video finishes with a pair of Marsh Harriers hunting the coastal marshes as the sun sets.
The majority of recordings were taken with a Panasonic Fz82. While it has great video and allows me to get shots I want, the lack of microphone input significantly compromises the audio quality.