Birds

Just a quick post   - I badly need to catch up with editing some photos. With any luck the long weekend for Easter will give me some of the time I need.
It's desperately cold and we have a lot of snow, though it doesn't lie for long in the daytime. I was hoping to be out putting compost on my borders and planting seeds, but it doesn't look likely!

Long tailed tits on the feeder.
.Robin in the garden, all puffed up against the cold. Definite signs of courtship  behaviour but the dominant male is not very responsive to the female's calls, and rather inept when he does react. As well as mealworms I have some suet pellets - and when he couldn't fit one into the female's beak he flew off with it and ate it himself. If, as I guess, the courtship behaviour is meant to show how good a mate he'd be at helping to feed a young brood, he's failing miserably on current showing!
Grey wagtail in town. in one of the rare sunny spells, singing away.

St. Patrick

I found a different photo for St. Patrick's Day this year - the coat of arms over the door of St. Patrick's University Hospital.  Founded in 1746 with a bequest from Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral it was one of the first hospitals to be planned and designed as a specialist psychiatric hospital.

I also have a couple of pictures of a city worker painting out graffiti on a gate. I like the first photo, but it needs the second one to put it in context.

Quick Picks

We've had bitterly cold weather this week, some snow, some grey skies and some lovely sunshine - mostly in the mornings.
The snow never actually lay on the ground that long, and on Monday it was so windy that what little there was formed drifts, leaving open green spaces and sudden white patches.

This photo is our neighbour's roof, where it looked like a fine dusting of icing (confectioners) sugar.

A quick snap of one of the robins. I was planting some sweetpea seedlings into pots the other day, and the robins were in heaven because they found a treasure-trove of worms underneath the sack of potting soil!

I'm not sure if this is some type of breeding plumage on the cormorant. I need to look back over older photos. It was the red splash that first caught my eye - and then I saw how much white there was on the head - as if he'd been sprinkled with snow too! The other day, for the first time ever, I saw not just one or two of them but six all perched on the wall across the road from Heuston Station. Digital zoom, so slightly more pixellated than I like.

And a fine black-headed gull.

Google are terminating Reader! How can they do that!! I'll have to find another programme before the clock runs out.

Cards

...and just finished reading: The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Hoeg. I picked it up in the library recently, because I had read and quite enjoyed Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow when it came out. C took a vague look at the book and dismissed it as not for him. But after he heard me giggling away here and there as I was reading it, he gave it a go, and it was my turn to hear him chuckling away. We renewed it again and passed it on to his mother who said she enjoyed it so much and she too laughed a lot. (Never having been over 5 foot even at her tallest, and now probably a couple of inches less, I think she really enjoyed the description of the short grandmother standing on things to reach the kitchen table). It was a strange book, slightly surreal (it reminded me of Sophie's World), but thoroughly enjoyable.

Favourite cards for February: