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.

Cold Snap

Life feels a little bit like those Whack-a-Mole games just now - I get one thing on my list accomplished and two more spring up to take its place!
We've had some bitterly cold weather this week. On Monday there was a little snow - I loved the look of it on the bell tower of St. James' church - it reminded me a little of the pyramids outside the Louvre.

A cold-weather visitor was the male blackcap! Not great photos - the back window needs cleaning badly, but one of C's bikes is parked in front of it. We've seen a female in the garden before more than once - her cap is brown, and I was amazed to see how black the male really is.

Funny story - one of the days I was putting food out, all three robins were there. The boldest one, who I think of as dominant male (and who is now flying to the back door when he hears me) came zipping out to get some worms. The female opened her beak hoping to be fed - we've seen this courtship behaviour before. But Mr Robin's thoughts were not of love, they were of feeding himself in the cold weather so he just flew back to his perch ignoring her totally. A black mark against him as a potential father, I am sure!!

The second video is a very short snippet of the dominant male singing. I have one of the lesser male which shows the bird so much better, but no song. You can't win all the time!!

A Robin New Year...

Not just one or even two but three robins today, co-existing moderately peacefully. I think it's probably one female and two males. In any case, plenty of singing going on!! All but the first photo are uncropped - he (?) was quite happy perched on the wall with me only a couple of feet away. A narrower aperture would have been a better choice but it was such a grey day that I had it open almost as far as it would go.

We also had a brief visit from what I am assuming is  probably a leucistic pigeon; I've certainly never seen one like this before in the garden. It came in along with two regular wood pigeons.

Birds

It's harder to take good photos of the birds since we've had to move the feeders - it either has to be through a window or I have to go and stand beside the house. But our current robin is becoming less timid, and a couple of days last week I even heard him singing away and not just making his territorial call.

Walking along the canal one morning last week I was thinking I had seen no wildlife at all, and then I spotted a grey squirrel, and a couple of minutes later, a grey heron.

Not a great photo, but probably the best I've managed yet of a wagtail. It was funny to see three pied wagtails flitting around along the Liffey one morning - usually it's grey wagtails I see there. And another heron, town cousin to the first one!!

Mostly birds

While all the birds found our feeder quite quickly, and returned within a couple of hours of putting food out after being away for a few days, we also have another less welcome visitor!

The photos of the sparrow and young great-tit were taken while we were spending a few days minding my aunt's dogs. The weather wasn't great - the best day was the afternoon we arrived, and after that there were several grey, wet days.

The robin is on our back wall - they all seem to be moulting at the moment. I had one on the patio this afternoon with no tail.

Happy Days are Here Again

We got back from Paris to discover that our neighbours had cut down their mahonia tree. I'm not at all surprised, it's never recovered from the heavy snows a couple of years back and has been a bit threadbare ever since. And I certainly won't miss stepping on those desperately spiky leaves in my bare feet, or the crushed berries on the patio, or the flowers getting everywhere. BUT, it was where I hung all my bird feeders. So, off to the shops to buy a bird-feeding station. I'll have to get another one some time when I've persuaded C that one isn't enough. The peanut feeder is tied on at the moment as there aren't enough hanging hooks for everything. In any case, it didn't take long for all the birds to find it, and we've been seeing the greenfinches, goldfinches, sparrows and dunnocks and all the varieties of tit. The only missing ones are the redpolls - I hope they'll come back some time. It's been funny to see one goldfinch having a decided preference for sunflower seeds whereas another one goes straight to the niger seeds.
It took a little adjusting to get the seed tray at a suitable height where I could actually see it from the house and the pigeons couldn't use it as a convenient stand to help themselves from the main seed feeder, but once I got it right, the dunnocks and robins are enjoying it. Hopefully the chaffinches, another ground-feeder - will too, when they find it.
A robin has also been visiting the back door again after a break - and today when I was standing there waiting to shut the back gate after C went out, we had a very welcome little visitor.

A Bunch of Birds

Various photos from the last week or so...
I'm not sure whether mallards use their feathers for nest lining, or whether this pair had just been fighting. If so, the one missing all the feathers certainly seemed to be the dominant of the two drakes, who were snoozing contentedly on the bank along with a female, until I walked along the path past them.

Mandarin drake

Redpoll

Redpoll

Goldfinch

 

I had a large heavy lens on my camera when I took this (from moon shots the previous night) so it's not as sharp as I'd like. But since this particular female robin calls to be fed from all over the place - next door, up in the trees, on the shed roof - I was happy to get any photo at all.

Miscellany

I should have a few photos edited tomorrow - and a new header for March! Where does time go?

In the mean time, a quick snippet of one of our robins, with some bird song.




We're seeing a lot of a pair of chaffinches at the moment, with the male in bright plumage -  but the weather is so grey and overcast that it's hard to get a good photo.

Favourite cards for February:

I used gold acrylic paint in the first one, and loved the brushed-metal look that it gave.

Birds

We are regularly having two robins together these days - one still a bit of a dimwit, and one who knows that when it hears the door open it's likely to get food.

Redpolls on the feeder. They're quite feisty little birds - while there may be six or more around, they don't seem to tolerate more than three at a time on the feeder.



Still getting regular visits from the female blackcap, though I haven't seen a male yet. And we had long-tailed tits on the fat-ball feeder the other day too - a real treat!

Park time

I had to go out shopping yesterday morning; the weather was a bit mixed but I stuck my camera(s) and some old bread in the car just in case, and it was well worth going for a quick walk in the park. It wasn't enough to wake me up sufficiently, apparently. I managed to delete, beyond retrieval, the photos on the Olympus, including some good tufted duck ones, and the female mandarin. Luckily I had used both cameras and still had a few photos left at the end...

Tufted Duck

A red-eared terrapin - presumably a released pet

I nearly missed noticing the terrapin, because it was unusual to have such a good view of the tufted duck staying still in one place, but I caught sight of it in the corner of the camera viewfinder. A moment later and it was gone.

My echinacea is long over, and I never got a photo of it. Mind you, it was nothing like as spectacular as this in Farmleigh!

Mrs Robin's plumage has grown back in - she now looks fresh and pretty, and is much less timid again also.

Speckled Egg and more

I haven't seen a speckled egg like this one in ever so long - I was about to crack it to make the batter for dinner, but then I thought I'd take a photo!

Mrs Robin's tail is growing in nicely. She's still moulting, though - as she was sitting on the wall early I could see a little breast feather blow off and drift away in the wind.

This bud is the yellow flower that looks a bit like a daisy. I still haven't looked through my flower books to try to identify it - it's got quite a fleshy stem. There's beautiful colour in the nigella seed-heads, too.

I can't think how long it is since I last baked this - ten years or more. I'd totally forgotten about it till I came across it again recently looking through the cookery book (Ronald Johnson's  The American Table). Last week I thought I'd asked the butcher for one piece of striploin that would do a stir-fry, but I discovered that he must have mis-heard: when I got home there was a large piece of sirloin, enough for the stir-fry and then a good bit left over. Just the right amount for this:

Colonial Beef Steak Pudding  (serves 4)

2 tblsp vegetable oil
1 lb boneless beef, cut into small bite-sized pieces
1 chopped onion
1 tblsp flour
1 cup beef stock,
2 tblsp tomato purée, 1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
Salt and pepper - I add thyme

2/3 cup sliced mushroooms - we're not mushroom fans, I use carrots
2 tbslp oil or beef dripping
1 cup milk
1 cup flour
2 eggs

Heat 2 tbslp oil quite hot, and brown the steak in batches. Add the second batch back to the pan, add the onion and cook for a few minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for another few minutes. Add the stock, tomato purée and Worcestershire Sauce, carrots and seasoning to taste. Bring to the boil, reduce hit and simmer over a very low heat uncovered for about 1 1/2 hours, till the meat is tender. If it dries out too much add a little more water, but the aim is that at the end of the cooking time there should be very little liquid left.
Heat the oven to 450F, 230C, Gas Mark 8.
Heat the oil or dripping in a 1 1/2 quart casserole, with at least 2"  sides.
When the oil is really hot, pour in the batter and then drop spoonfuls of the steak mixture over the top. Bake for 15-20 minutes till the pudding is puffed and brown.
My recollection is that I used to do this in a soufflé type dish, so that's what I used tonight, but I think it would have been better in a wider, shallower dish. Certainly when we used to have toad--in-the-hole my mother used a roasting tin, partially cooking the sausages and then pouring the batter over. We used to have it with sugar - that seems strange to me know. But Yorkshire pudding is good to me almost any way it comes, and essentially that's what this is, except that I use milk and water mixed for Yorkshire puddings.

A Miscellany

Photos that didn't make it as the blog header this month!

My other favourite cards from July. Seems I made up for having felt in a creative slump all June to have ended up with several that were all favourites. Neither of these is my normal style at all.

Mrs Robin has been very elusive recently - even when she is around she's been much more timid than normal. I suppose it's because she feels vulnerable, but from my point of view it's as if she doesn't want her photo taken while she looks so shabby. She'll snatch a couple of worms and then retire behind the bin. I'm happy to say that after several days of not seeing her at all, today she flew straight down to the back step and stayed there to eat - with her new tail starting to show and looking all fresh. No camera handy, alas. These are from last weekend, the last time I'd seen her properly.