I have visited Aspö’s rich island nature regularly since 1982 and live here permanently since 2008. The island is located in the Baltic Sea, in the Southeastern archipelago of Sweden, South of Karlskrona, Blekinge. Aspö is then surrounded by other islands except in the Southern part, where there is open sea all the way to the European continent. Besides its wildlife, Aspö is also worth visiting due to its outstanding cultural history, inter alia demonstrated by that the island is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre: The Naval Port of Karlskrona, established at the beginning of the 1700’s. Many historic military installations are then found on the island. Aspö is also much influenced by its agricultural and fisheries past, where the settlements are mainly found along the East and West coasts, creating a lot of space in-between for wildlife. Aspö is presented more in detail on the website’s first page, including a number of photos of its cultural history and scenery, flowers and trees as well as a general overview of the animals photographed by me on the island.
The nature is diverse, where the Northern and Central parts are dominated by a pine tree forest, and the other parts by a deciduous forest. The good mix of various biotopes is reflected in the large variety of animals found on this website.
The photographs taken outside Aspö in Sweden and throughout the globe is presented on another website: www.globalwingsphoto.com, where the dominating animal is birds followed by butterflies, bees and hoverflies. There are also many photos of mammals, primarily in Africa and India as well as some reptiles from Latin-America, in particular. The global animal kingdom is divided it into its European, Asian, African, American, and Australian parts. There is also a part by the name of ‘Themes’- a kind of anthology in pictures on themes such as the family life of Jabiru storks in the Pantanal, Brazil, for example. On a last page is found photos compiled from various parts of the world into field guides on for example the ages of the Steppe Eagle and the White-tailed Eagle. Another subpage is devoted to comparing the vultures of the world, all of which I have seen and photographed (except one).
The wildlife photos of this Aspö website start with the mammals, followed by the reptiles and the amphibians.The plentiful images of the birds taken on the island come next and are split up into four groups of photos: Swans up to Waders; Gulls up to Swallows; and, Warblers up to Flycatchers and Redstarts up to Buntings. The bird photos are systematized according to the ‘Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World’, published by HBW and BirdLife International in Lynx Edicions (2014). Here, the world population of birds are ordered according to recent research results on species and races. This taxonomy often differs from those found in most local field guides. The English names of the birds are also taken from this checklist of the birds of the world.
The largest number of wildlife photos on this Aspö website concern insects, several of which are taken in my garden. The many beautiful butterflies and moths shown involve Butterflies, Geometer moths as well as Owlet moths, Hawk moths and a few others. The order of presenting the butterfly photos is based on the first volume of the ‘Encyclopedia of the Swedish Flora and Fauna’ that covers all 140 species of Nordic butterflies (‘Nationalnyckeln’, Uppsala, Sweden 2005). The order for the moths chiefly follows the fieldguide ‘Sveriges fjärilar’ (Bugbook Publishing, 2011).
Four groups of beetles are presented on one page, namely Longhorn beetles; Stag beetles; Ladybirds and Soldier beetles; plus Ground beetles and cleroidea, along with True bugs.
This part is followed by the large variation of wasps photographed on Aspö, first Bees, and Bumblebees. The photos of these wasps are named and systematized according to ‘The Field Guide to Bees of Great Britain and Ireland’ by Steven Falk (2015). It is also useful for the bee fauna in Sweden, since most of those of the book are also found here. Another big group of wasps included are the Vespidae, which have been classified and named based on ‘Steklar: Myror – getingar, Nationalnyckeln, Artdatabanken, 2012’. Other groups of wasps included on this page are Spider wasps, Emerald wasps, Sphecoid wasps, and Parasitican wasps together with Sawflies.
Photos of the diptera (a large group of flies) are found on the next page, that is Hoverflies; Horse-and-deer flies; Robber flies and Stiletto flies; Beeflies; Thick-headed flies; Tachind flies plus four other families of flies assembled in one group. For hoverflies, I use the Swedish and scientific names found in another ‘Nationalnyckel’, viz. ‘Tvåvingar: Blomflugor’ from 2009. Since there are no English names given in this guide for the hoverflies, I use their scientific names. Generally, it is harder to find English as well as Swedish names for many of the flies and some other insects photographed. I therefore use their scientific names mostly based on the ‘Artdatabanken’ in those cases, where I cannot specify them in English or Swedish.
The last section of insects consists of Damselflies and Dragonflies, Bush crickets, and Spiders.
Equipment
I have mainly used a Pentax K-3 camera with a Pentax 300 lens and 18-135 lens to take the pictures found on this website. In my digital darkroom is found Adobe Photoshop CC 2015, and Adobe Lightroom CC .
wildlifeaspo.com 