Morrey Salmon and Geoffrey Ingram's Diaries - March 1913

Working on the Morrey Salmon images such as the one of a Blackbirds nest taken in April 1912  it became clear that there was a lot of untapped information in the diaries that the National Museum of Wales had stored as part of the Collection 

However on initial review it became clear that what the Museum had stored as Morrey Salmon's diaries were actually Geoffrey Ingram's and the Salmon diaries were missing. 

Luckily a number of the Salmon diaries have been located by the family and have been passed to the project team and are now being transcribed (the handwriting is difficult) and we have the following from this time 102 years ago

Sunday 2nd March 1913	6.4am. HNS & HMS. Port Talbot to Porthcawl.
Saturday 8th March 1913	5.45am.  HMS.  Radyr Quarry & Wood.  Found beginning of 1 Thrushes nest and another half finished & partly lined.  Wren not started under old tree.  Heard Goldcrest.  Saw Redwing & Bullfinch.

This suggests that he went to the first location with someone else (it could be one of his brothers or Herbert Short) and the second location himself. His entries are very brief 

Compare that with the following by Geoffrey Ingram who kept a fascinating detailed diary of bird sightings and behaviour at this same time 

March 2nd 1913

Watched a Missle Thrush mobbing a pair of Jackdaws in the grounds of Roath Court. The birds wished to alight on a beech tree that the Thrush had evidently selected as a nesting site 7 it was very amusing to watch is chasing the poor Doves from pillar to post

March 5th 1913

Started out by myself at 6.10 A.M. for the Wild Park. Thrushes, Blackbirds, Robins & Hedge Sparrows singing as I cycled up. A number of Duck on the lake mostly Mallards & Tufted although I heard a Wigeons whistle several times. Chaffinches & Wren singing as I entered the Wild Gardens Had a look through the wood & around the South-east end but found no signs of any nest. Saw a Magpie & heard a Green Woodpecker. Also saw a pair of Long Tailed Tits two or three Moorhens Great Tits, Blue Tits, & heard the Bullfinches. Nice clear morning & very mild Marsh Mallows, Daisy’s & Primroses in bloom & leaves appearing on Hawthorn, Honeysuckle, Field Rose & a number of other Trees & Shrubs

All of their records went into the Cardiff Naturalists Bird reports and subsequently into the County Avifaunas and we owe these pioneers a huge debt of gratitude for their work which we can now use to see how the city and climate have changed over the intervening 102 years    

Note the spelling of Mistle thrush, this is how it was recorded in his early dairies, the more usual modern spelling was adopted later

Picture now copyright National Museum of Wales, used under CNS licence

Declaring Success on the Salmon Negatives

 We've reached the point where all of the Salmon negatives have been cleaned and stored in acid free paper and boxes. 

Well we though t we had and we should manage it this week. What we found out at the last minute from Robin the Museum's photographer was that there were a few extras stored within the Dark Slides and he arranges to have these taken out for us so we have just a handful to deal with this week 

So there are a little over 3100 done and we have spent something like 2500 person hours on this as a team of volunteers which is incredible

We are now working on the archive and that's turning up a whole heap of new information, but more of that to come.  

In the mean time here are some nice pictures 

Red-backed Shrike Young in nest 22/6/1921

Grey heron, Thaw Valley 12/4/1925

Merlin and chicks, Ireland Moor, Radnorshire, 6/7/1952

Ronald Lockley (left) and Ex-king Ferdinand of Bulgaria (centre) at the IOC congress 1934 onboard a Royal Navy Destroyer "borrowed" for the day to ferry birdwatchers around 3 islands 

Billy the seal and Victoria Park Zoo

As the team are working on the Morrey Salmon photographs project we sometimes come across a number of pictures which are not part of his core wild bird photography hobby 

One of the places that he visited from time to time was the (now defunct and from other information that is probably a good thing) Victoria Park Zoom 

Here is a quick selection of pictures that you may find of interest 

A seal which we presume to be the famous Cardiff  "Billy the Seal" 

A Pelecan

Some Grey Crowned Cranes 

Has Bird Photography become too easy OM-1 vs Morrey Salmons Glass plate camera ?

 I recently had the pleasure of visitng Skomer to photograph puffins with bird photography expert Rob Cottle and the technical experts from OM System UK where I was kindly loaned their latest flasgship camera the OM-1 

I was easily able to get some excellent pictures of the puffins as I hope you agree from the small selection of images that follows here. 

One of the key aspects of the day was to try and get pictures of the puffins in flight and the Bird AI features of the OM-1 really did lock in on the eye of the bird and enable you to track and get multiple pictures of the birds

Puffin in Flight

It was equally good at locking on the birds on the ground of course 

Puffin with Sand Eels

And dealing with extemes in dark and light in the same picture 

Razorbill resting

Guillemot keeping an eye on things

This got me thinkging about the amount of equipment that I was carrying (and my shoulder did feel the weight of the camera bag by the end of the day) and the number of images that I had taken (over 500 across the 2 cameras I was testing) and how that compared to the incredibly hard work that Morrey Salmon, his photographic partner Geoffrey Ingram and various other family and friends went to to get one or two images at a time (depending on the camera back that they were using) 

Take this for instance it is simply titled GSCI (Geoffrey Ingram) photogrpahing Herring gulls nest 22 June 1911. We have not been able to identify the location as yet, but clearly the Welsh coast or islands because that was the limit of their travels at this time. From the scan of the full negative you can see the safety rope from the cliff top (BTW thatis not approved belaying technique)

And from this cropped in version you can see the size of the camera and tripod and the size of his accessories bag which is about the same size as the camera bag I was carrying three cameras and lenses in for my day out.

As if climbing down a relatively gentle sloping cliff wasn't eough, Morrey and Geoffrey weren't averse to lugging their camera up a tree to get a picture. This photo by Morrey Slamon shows  geoffrey Ingram up a tree to photograph a Spassowhawks nest

Cropping in a little allows you to once again see the scale of the equipment

And they were not limited to natural obstacles, old buildings were scaled with the same level of skill and amounts of equipment such as this odl mill from St-y-Nyll near cardiff pictures taken in July 1911 whereby you can see some once again non approved modern safety technique

They clearly both made it as can be seen in this picture and from the fact we know this partnership went on for another 5 years or so

So maybe things have become a lot easier, but we all owe a debt of gratitude to these pioneers who proved that it could be done, and done well as more pictures that we share will no doubt prove.  

 

The Salmon family visits the archive project

 The volunteers working on the Morrey Salmon photographic project were honoured last friday (16/Jun/23) to have a visit by Hugh Salmon and his two daughters, Jennifer and Fiona

We described the process we are doing and Hugh made a short but moving speech about how much the family was feeling honoured by the dedication of all these people putting in their own time to clean and conserve the photographs 

Hugh (seated) with Jennifer and Mike Dean to his left and Jana Horak (NMW) and Fiona to his right 

Hugh, Jennifer and Fiona have the clenaing process described as Julian Carter (NMW) looks on and Julian Carter (CNS) cleans a negative

Hugh, Jennifer and Fiona with Morrey's picture in the background 

As you can see from the pictures, we were hosted on this day by Jana Horak and Julian Carter from the National Museum of Wales. NMW staff have been overseeing us and helping us with all of the work  

Morrey Salmon Photographic collection

We're up and running fully now with the Morrey Salmon Photographic collection cleaning (and subsequently digitsing). 

Here he is in the 1980s with his third camera 

Copyright National Museum of Wales used under CNS licence

He was recognised as an incredible man notonly in this field but because of his military service in WW1 and WW2. Some of that is noted in his biography 

“Col. Morrey Salmon must now be regarded as the father of British bird photography” (Eric Hosking OBE. Bird photographer).

“He was a legendary figure from way back in the early days of conservation in this country” (Sir Peter Scott CH, CBE, DSC & Bar, FRS, FZS, Founder of the WWT and WWF).

“He – by quite extraordinary efforts well outside what might be regarded as a norm – made a major contribution to RAF operations in North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Balkans. His dedication and professional competence set a standard which has been reflected in RAF Regiment operations ever since” (Air Vice-Marshall Donald Pocock).

“I especially valued the leadership he was able to give in Wales in regard to ornithology and conservation” (Max Nicholson, President RSPB).

“He was a great Naturalist and a great Welshman” (Roger Lovegrove RSPB).

From his first bird photograph taken in 1909 to his later work we will be looking at it all 

Lapwing by Morrey Salmon copyright National Museum of Wales used under CNS licence

After the introduction training a couple of weeks ago where Lisa from the National Museum of Wales taught us how to clean glass lantern slides and glass negatives we had our first full session today with about 100 glass negatives cleaned and repackaged into acid free archival envelopes. 

This is a "long haul project" with over 3600 objects currently noted to be dealt with and that doesn't mean just cleaning and repackaging we have to identify the pictures and locations and put information togetether about each one from his diaries and notebooks and other CNS resources so there is a long way to go. 

But we thought you may like to see a few pictures of the current volunteers at work and some of the pictures we are already working on. 

As you can see from the sparrow on the birdbox some of the pictures are sadly in a bad way, but many more are in almost perfect condition and the quality of the photography given the equipment available is nothing less than amazing. 

There is a lot more of this story to tell so keep watching out for future posts.

Howardian Bioblitz / survey day

 We used to call them wildlife surveys, but the "in" term these days seems to be bioblitz 

Anyway when you get a whole load of eyes on the plant and animal life in one location with people of all abilities calling out what they have noticed and a scattering of experts along to help with the trickier identifications you can find a whole load of things and add them to the records for the site 

CNS members recently went to the Howardian Local Nature reserve with the friends of the reserve and spent a valuable few hours looking for and identifying things and we have a nice new species list on our website https://cardiffnaturalists.org.uk/htmfiles/reserves.htm to show for it 

The Friends group already have an impressive list on their website, but if you look carefully you can find things on this new list that are not as yet on the howardian site http://www.howardianlnr.org.uk/ (we are sure they will update to include them soon, so by the time you read this it could be updated)

There will be a full write up of the day in the next newsletter, but for now why not take a look at what we found and enjoy these pictures taken by Rob and Linda Nottage 

Some of the team at work

Oedemera nobilis Thick Legged Flower Beetle

Arge cyanocrocea Bramble sawfly