Birds...

As promised, I found a couple of photos of my hop-along gull.
He seems to show a marked preference for standing on solid ground (or at least some of the junk that litters the river bed!) and when you see the photo of the regular two-legged gull sinking into the mud it's not hard to understand why. I'm sure one leg is a lot less stable.
Also some juvenile gulls - I'm not quite sure whether they're Black-backed or Herring.

And recently I saw a juvenile goldfinch on the feeders. C asked me how I knew that was what it was. Well, when I saw one this afternoon and called him to have a look, he knew instantly what it was - even without that distinctive red head the adults have. Taken through a not very clean back window...

One last photo - when I was walking down the road the other day I saw a dead dragonfly - already attracting a lot of wasps and flies, but at least they flew off when I knelt down to take a photo. I suppose it wasn't too far away from the canal, but it was sad to see it just lying there dead on the ground. They're quite big, over two and a half inches long.  I think this is probably a female Common Hawker.

Almost Missing in Action

I thought I'd better post something before August is over! I don't know where it has gone, but it's just zipping by.

With the schools still out (not for much longer) the traffic into town has been so light in the mornings that I've had more time than normal for watching the birds at Heuston Station.
One morning I spotted a black-headed gull with a ring, and I spotted him again the next morning. I was directed to a website to look up all the various ringing projects, and it turns out that he was ringed as a young male last year in Antwerp in the Netherlands. I'm still watching out for him, but except at low tide when the birds are on the mudflats, it's hard to spot the ring.

There is also a one-legged gull: I've spent a lot of time watching over the last few days to make sure, and having watched him take off and land, I am certain that it is that he just has one leg, and not that he prefers to stand on one when he's perched. I'll try to edit and upload a photo of him this week - I have a few in the camera, just haven't looked at them yet.

Favourite cards for July...

I'm surprised to discover I have any gold embossing powder left after the Asian fish one. It's still just a piece of heavy card, in case I decide that I would prefer to turn it into a hanging rather than use it on a card.

Autumn Evenings

The evenings are already noticeably shorter - but it was still bright enough for us to go for a walk in the park after a late dinner this evening, and make the most of a holiday Monday.

Most of the ducks were settling down for the evening, but this heron was fishing (we saw him catch something, too) and a coot and chick did come over to us for some of my bread crumbs. They've already harvested the grass in most of the park, but if the weather stays as it is (warm, sunny, some rain) I can see that they might even be able to cut a second crop of hay; the grass is already quite long in places.

(the bee on the allium is actually from August 2011, in Birr. I couldn't find any suitable header photos from August last year)

Water-lilies

The weather is meant to be cooling down - so hopefully I can get back to editing Greek photos (and selecting ones to print!).
In the meant time, I did say the water-lilies in the Botanic Gardens were quite lovely - here are a few.
I love the names for water lilies, too - nénuphar in French, Nymphaeaceae as the Latin family name, which makes me think of naiads and dryads.

Summer days...

It's still hot and sunny here.
We made time for a quick visit to the Botanic Gardens this morning because there was a patchwork exhibition on which I didn't want to miss. Of course while we were there we had to fit in a short walk around the gardens - along the borders where they plant annuals, down the herbaceous border, around the ponds and back. Plenty of waterlilies in the ponds - photos to follow. I'm not sure that we've ever seen them looking so beautiful before.

This was in a wildflower border:

And the mating dragonflies were down among the waterlilies.

June Cards

Phew - this weather has been fabulous but way too hot to spend much time in my attic, where the temperature has been mostly over 28C.
So not much more photo-editing has been achieved, unfortunately.
Instead, I'm picking out my favourite June cards. Lean pickings, as it was such a busy month between one thing and another.

I've been trying to photograph graffiti around town for an older SCS photo challenge, and this first photo is one I spotted today. I saw the second one a couple of weeks ago - one of the days when my camera was in being cleaned, and I just had C's little pocket camera. But since it was an area of town I don't often walk through, I was glad to have it when I saw the wolf.

I've seen baby robins in the hedge! Have to wait for them to emerge before I can get any photos, though.

Creeping, Crawling

We saw lots of wildlife in Corfu. Yikes, it's now July, and I'm still posting for May! I suppose it's another advantage of going a little earlier in the year before it gets too hot and dry. C was delighted because we saw several live snakes, as opposed to all the dead ones we saw on a previous visit. I couldn't see what the big deal was with the snakes - the tortoises and lizards were far more interesting to me. It was just a shame that when we saw a tortoise making very rapid progress along the road, my memory card was so full that I couldn't take any video footage. We saw at least three different types of lizard - one was in a dark shaded area and the one photo I was able to grab didn't turn out. The little green one was near Sidari, and we saw dozens of them basking in the sun, not paying the slightest attention to all the tourists walking around them. The other one was in the grounds of the little monastery at the top of Mount Pantokrator - the highest mountain on the island (this is a relative term, it's only 906m / 2,972 ft high).

A bird in the bush...

...tree.
I think all my grey wagtail photos so far have been either on the walls along the Liffey or down on the mud flats at low tide.
So it was a rare treat to catch a couple of shots of one perched in a tree this morning.

Last July shows very thin pickings to choose a header photo from. I nearly had to skip back a year to 2011 to find anything, but I found this photo of a young mallard sitting on the canal bank.

New Bird on the Block

Before we went away we had a whole swarm of redpolls eating us out of house and home, according to C.
When we came back, we had no birds at all except the robins for a couple of weeks, and then the tits came back in good numbers.
But we seem to have done a full exchange of redpolls for linnets! I hadn't seen one for maybe 7 years, so it took a couple of days before I realised that those red fronts back on the feeders weren't redpolls at all. Different colour beak, different shade of red, different call, more black and white on the wings should all have given it away much sooner if I'd been more alert.

This was an exceptionally busy week on a whole lot of fronts, so no photo-editing, alas.
And more computer problems, alas again, but they seemed to resolve themselves quite quickly this time.

Korission Surprise

I know that when I uploaded my first few photos from Lake Korission I said we had had a lovely surprise.
And then life got busy...family wedding, family funeral, computer problems, internet problems...
But finally I'm getting time to chip away slowly at editing some more photos.

Our lovely surprise was a whole flock of flamingoes on the lagoon. We certainly hadn't seen them before, even though we'd visited at the same time of year, and neither had another couple we spoke with.
I wished I'd brought my Canon for the extra zoom, but I just had to make do with my medium telephoto for the Olympus - I didn't even bring the longer one on holiday with us. I was grateful at least to have that - the last time we went and were thrilled just to have seen several egrets, all I had was my little pocket Olympus with practically no zoom at all.

We also saw egrets again this time - you can see one in the first of the flamingo photos.
It was our first time seeing red-legged stilts apart from in France two years ago. They're quite small birds, so I really did wish for some extra zoom for them - and for a squacco heron, no shots worth sharing.

The two photos of the swallows were taken in a little café at the top of the road where we turned off to go down to the lagoon. It was delicious coffee, too - we had two cups each, and a long bike-centred conversation with the owner.