7th: Swanwick Lakes – Hampshire and the Isle of Wight

The most local reserve to us and one I certainly plan to revisit. Incredibly, or more accurately embarrassingly, this wonderful place is only 4 miles from our front door and we’d never been there! It has many mixed habitats (lakes, woodland grassland etc) and is really beautiful.

It was a real whistle stop visit, so the sketch was done after returning to the studio. We saw a goldcrest, our smallest bird with a lot of character. They never seem to stay still long enough to photograph, or get a good look at, which only makes me want to paint them more. We also saw a thrush and many, many geese. There were also many cowslips, but they were just past their best, but still very much worth seeing!