Back to reality

After three weeks in China I am now back home. Normal service will be resumed here as soon as possible...

Go East Young Man

This blog will be quite for three weeks while my wife and I travel to China to visit our daughter. See you on the other side and, with luck, there'll be some garden activity to write about by then.

Finger twiddling

Silence has reigned here because there has been so little to write about. Magpies, jackdaws and pigeons have been the main visitors. There have been some blackbirds around, the odd dunnock and the occasional blue tit.

It would be classic British understatement I suppose to say that this is disappointing but there we are.

Snow Show

We had a couple of inches of snow last night with an attempt at fresh powder this morning.

I always like fresh snow because in the early morning it shows the tracks of whatever has been wandering around in the night - in our case usually fox trails.

The birdlife remains quiet, although when I went into the back-garden this morning I could hear plenty of small bird activity from a couple of gardens along. I had a temporary flush of bird-feeder rage then just enjoyed the chirruping and cleared snow of the bird feeders.

I have one bird feeder up at the back of the garden which the birds have largely ignored since I put it there and I have been thinking of moving it. This morning it was discovered by a solitary blue tit and a dunnock, though, so maybe it will finally be established. 

Night Visiting

There was something making a noise in one of the gardens in our street last night so I went out just after midnight to check it wasn't in ours. For some reason, habit possibly, I glanced at one of the nut feeders and spotted this mouse feasting away.

I went back inside quickly and grabbed the Leica D-Lux 5 and expected that the mouse would have scarpered but it hadn't and it sat obligingly quietly whicle I snapped a couple of pics. I knew that something was eating the peanuts overnight and I suspected a mouse but it was a surprise to get up close and personal.

Still Quiet

The garden has been quiet these past few days. This could be for a number of reasons - sparrowhawks, cats, magpies... In any event the main visitors have been pigeons and multiple magpies.

Small birds have been noticeable by their absence - the odd blackbird in the hedge at the back, the dunnock in the picture, and a squabbling flock of house sparrows at the feeder briefly.

I'm a little surprised as the weather has been a bit bracing for the past couple of days and I would have expected them to be looking out every food source that they can.

We'll see.

In the meantime as the picture on the right shows, January is definitely here. I snapped this shot of the Pentlands from our front door around lunchtime today. We had snow flurries and a quick blast of hail at one point and over by the hills a pressure inversion.

Having said that, although the skies were threatening it didn't really amount to much. I'm going up to Inverness on Thursday though and I expect the train journey up to be spectacular.

All a bit quiet

I was away for a few days this week and hence no posts here. If those days were like today, though, there wouldn't have been much to post - magpies and wood pigeons mainly. I know there are plenty of small birds around but they aren't coming here at the moment.

Two of the magpies were squabbling in mid-air though, handbags at dawn style, which was entertaining for a short while. There was also an increasingly uncommon grey squirrel trying to climb the harled walls of the flats opposite, the same flats which have jackdaws preparing a nest site in a chimney pot.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that even though it is only 12th January, there are buds appearing on my Katy and Cox's Orange Red apple trees. Colder weather is threatened though.

Sparrowhawk

Sparrowhawk

I mentioned the other day that recent sparrowhawk activity had happened when I didn't have a camera handy. That changed this morning as I was sorting breakfast for myself and caught movement out of the corner of my eye.

This sparrowhawk sat for about a minute on the roof of our neighbour's garden shed which is over the hedge just outside our kitchen window. Most of the time it was looking the other way but I managed to get a couple of decent shots of which this is one.

It looks well fed which, as I've mentioned before, is a good sign of the health of the general prey population albeit that they made themselves scare this morning. 

Nikon D7000 with AF-S Nikkor 18-200 zoom at 200mm

When The Levee Breaks

I'm cross-posting this here and on Riding the Waves to Eternity. When the Levee Breaks is a project in which one of my on-line chums Ollie Hulme is involved. They plan to record a version of the old blues classic When The Levee Breaks as a charity single for flood relief in the West Country. Take a look at the page or the associated Facebook page

Some more old pics.

	Another through the kitchen window at the long end of a digital zoom - this fieldfare was one of a flock that hung around one of our apple trees for a while in 2009. Panasonic FZ7
	A Devil's Coach Horse beetle (thanks to Jim King for identification). This specimen was out on our front driveway and was lucky not to get trodden on as we walked past. Leica D-Lux5, 2012
	This young fox was another that hung around our garden in the sunshine for many days in 2010. Panasonic FZ7
	This fox cub was in 2012 on the site where my new shed now stands. I had walked out into the garden to pick up some rubbish and hadn't noticed it lying there chewing a windfall apple. We sat and looked at each other for a while before it wandered off through the gap in the hedge behind it. Shot on my mobile phone at the time - HTC Desire HD.
	Another frog, this one from 2010. I took this on an earlier mobile phone - a T-Mobile G1 - which I had down pretty much on the ground in front of its face. This one gave me a fright at the time - I thought it was a random piece of dog dirt until it started moving...