Birds of Prey

I took more photos last Saturday than I'd like to admit to, and not enough of the descriptive boards saying what each bird was. But here are some of the raptors, most of which I can put a name to.

My favourite of all was the little American kestrel - weighing only 4 ounces and half the size of our own European one.

Irish kestrel

Various hawks

Golden Eagle

When C went last year, this was one of the birds that they had out , and some of the Harley riders posed with it. This photo gives a good idea of the size of it. I thought I had a better photo which somebody else had taken - all C had with him was a little point and shoot - but if I do, I can't find it.

I'll be back with some owls...

MIA

I feel as if I've been missing in action for a while. Easter was busy, and then I fell and hurt my arm - it's still sore, but there were only a couple of days when I didn't feel it was sensible to try to get up the ladder to the attic.
Today the weather was better than the forecast earlier this week, so we headed down to Rathwood near Tullow and spent some time looking at the owls and birds of prey, and then had a walk in the woods. We were lucky that the torrential rain and hail downpours all happened when we were either in the car or under shelter. More photos will follow...The little owl is really little - and must also be very light, as I didn't feel him at all when he landed on my back!

The oilseed rape is out all over the place, adding great splashes of colour to the landscape.

Off now to see how well my Salted Caramel Tart turned out - for starters I think I made it a bit large, but I don't posses an 8" flan ring.

Howth

Happy Easter!
It's a grey, rainy day here. We had hot cross buns for our breakfast on Good Friday, but I'm saving a lamb roast for tomorrow.
During the week I had to get a medical for work, and afterwards I walked on over to Howth to visit some relatives. As we were having guests in the evening I wanted to get home in good time, but I still had a bit of time to walk round the village on my way back home again.

I have a few more photos, but I'm still trying to get to the bottom of my computer problem. I'm sure it can't be good to get an error message every single time I shut down; next stop is to try a Windows repair as everything else so far has failed.

I saw this blackbird in the trees yesterday when I went down to the butcher. We were watching another pair hunting for worms in the front lawn this morning.

Cards

I don't seem to have too many favourite cards from March. I think I was too busy trying to fix all my computer problems.

And I did have a lot of fun working out how to make my own pop-up house instead of just settling for using a pre-made template. No point in having several paper-engineering books and not using them. I already know one thing I'd change if I make a parallel cube again, and the pitch of the roof is a lot steeper than I would want.

More birds

I meant to have included these tufted ducks in the last bunch of birds. They were quite far off on the lake, but it's still probably the best picture I have for showing the tufts. There are a lot of them at Farmleigh at the moment.

This pair of greenfinches were gorging themselves on sunflower seeds today - and as luck would have it, just when the sun was out. I need to clean the glass in the back door, though.

This sheep tea-cosy is my latest completed knitting project. I'm currently working on an Aran tunic-style sweater for myself, but I think something for my nephew is going to have to take precedence.