One week, two walks

 Last Saturday we picked C's niece up from the Luas terminus ( light rail network) and went for a walk in Phoenix Park before lunch. First thing we saw after parking was a group of people with large nets, and when I looked back, it was four years ago less one day that I had also seen a similar sight, and it was people looking for the young fawns to tag them.

Mallard with chicks on the bank of one of the ponds, hen tufted duck with chicks on the Quarry pond (they're hard to see, but if you zoom in you'll see the chicks are still so small that one of them is standing on a lily pad)... When C's brother and all the family were over here 20 years ago we also went for a walk in the park, and when the girls first saw the deer, they were so excited that they were finding it difficult to hold their cameras steady to take photos. So it was nice to see a large herd of deer again this time.

We've been having something of a heatwave here - not as extreme as the UK and mainland Europe, but still hot by Irish standards. Last night we went for a walk along the canal in the evening.

The foreground in the heron shot is one of the houseboats moored along the bank. There were two adult swans and four cygnets down at the 12th Lock. And walking back I spotted a hen blackbird gathering berries to bring back to the nest. 

April Favourites

 With the Easter break and the longer brighter evenings it seems like I was a bit more productive in April! 

My blog header is from a visit to the Shackleton gardens last May when a friend from the UK was over for a week. It was fabulous weather, we went on two day trips, and another day he and I walked to the gardens along the canal bank while C was working. 

  The plant is Nectaroscordum siculum, and the clumps of it were absolutely thronging with bees. I have some coming along nicely in pot myself this year, I can see the buds developing. 

We have a holiday weekend here and I hope to get time to cull a bulk upload from two outings last week, but here a few as a quick sampling - Farmleigh and the National Bird of Prey Centre.

January Favourites

 not many - it's been a busy month!

The second picture was for a sgraffito challenge. I had painted some excess gold acrylic onto heavy card, so for the challenge I decided to overpaint it with a dark blue, and I swirled C's comb through it. 

A couple of nice walks - we went to Bull Island one Saturday morning because the new mudguards for my bicycle had arrived, and the shop was not far from one of the access roads to the island.  We were lucky because it was a sunny and dry day without too much wind, and with the tide on the turn coming in, we got to see a good few birds. I'll add a few photos here but there's an album which you can see by clicking HERE. The following weekend I was down with my sister for her birthday, and we went to a reserve near her. Not nearly as lucky with the weather, but I was glad I'd brought my long zoom lens because we still got to see plenty of birds - more curlew, shelduck, a few wigeon and a lot of teal. The first three photos are from Bull Island, the next ones are from Harper's Island. And the last one was taken on the way to work on Thursday - two days after the worst of the flooding. On Tuesday most of the cycle path was under water. 

This month's header is a photo from a walk along the Lee in Cork last February - a curlew and some oystercatchers in flight. 

February Favourites

 Once again are thin on the ground...

We had such dismal weather - it was making the news headlines when some parts of the country had seen no sunshine for 10 days. So my sister and I decided that last weekend was probably a better bet than the previous one for me to go down to Cork. It probably was - Sunday was very wild, wet and windy but we had a lovely walk along the Lee in the afternoon on Saturday, and with the tide going out, got to see more than just seagulls. It was especially lovely to see two curlews - we heard them on one of our walks elsewhere last year but didn't see them. This time it was see but not here. I still haven't edited my photos from that walk yet, so I'll just add a few photos here and then (hopefully) have a link to an album next time I manage to make a post. 

Curlew, curlew with oystercatchers, turnstone, plover, and a painted drainage something or other - the little ladybird was painted over a protrusion in the pipework. If I'd known that we were likely to see so many birds I'd either have brought my Nikon or a longer lens for my Olympus, but with the weather forecast being what it was, I had no great expectations. 

This month's blog header is some snakeshead fritillaries in Farmleigh, taken last March. 

Botanic Birds and Beasts

 I'll split the Botanic Gardens into two posts as I have several mandarin duck photos...

As per the title, this one is (mostly) birds. 

A snatched shot of the squirrel. From the sound in the bushes we had thought it was a bird, but I think it was the squirrel taking a flying leap to grab a berry from the tree. 

I'll be back with May Favourites tomorrow, and then the flowers from the Botanic Gardens.

The full album can be found here.