To the victor the spoils

It's entertaining to see the young birds happily pecking away on the feeders themselves, but when a parent comes in sight  they start making cheeping noises and opening their beaks wide.
On the other hand, when you see the tiny portion they manage to get from a peanut compared to an adult, I guess they still do need some supplementary feeding!!

This coal tit spent a lot of time picking away at the dead end of a mahonia twig. I think it might have been looking for nesting material - it flew off with its spoils, and then came back and picked something else out of the gutter.

And just for a change from peanuts, this little great tit went scavenging in the shed gutter...

Singing Chaffinch

It has always bugged me that I find it so hard to learn birdsong enough to identify. I even had a whole sound theme on my computer at one stage with different bird songs for opening and closing files, new email, starting up and so on.  That didn't work, and anyway I prefer a silent setting as I often have the radio on. It annoys me even more because I know I have a musical ear - play me a song a few times and I can pick out all the basic and most of the less basic chords. You'll lose me when it gets to things like minor sevenths with added ninths and so on, but it always surprises C how much I can pick up and if he finds the sheet music I am right. And picking up a melody by ear on the flute is easy - it's only if I want to harmonise that I like to see some music, or at least the chords.
 Anyway - this was the year I learned to identify a chaffinch from its song, so when we heard a bird singing loudly in the trees just as we crossed the railway line and turned down the canal I was able to say "that's a chaffinch". And I was right....

Lights, camera, action...

The other day I spotted a robin that looked a bit odd, but it took me a while to work out that it had no tail feathers. I thought I was imagining it, though a snatched shot certainly looked as if this was the case. C said he saw it yesterday or this morning and was sure it had no tail; this afternoon I was able to grab a couple of shots. I feel it's not one of our resident pair, because it's quite timid in comparison and flies off when I go out, rather than coming up to the back door for worms.

This one, I think, probably is one of the resident pair as I was able to get up much closer. He looks as if he'd been fighting too. Certainly I found a little robin feather in the back porch the other day!

 We had a young magpie visit us this evening. During the afternoon I heard a bit of rustling in the chimney and some bits of dirt coming down, but I checked the grate twice and there was nothing there. No cawing or vocal noises, either. I was on the phone to my dad after dinner and C came up looking for help because he'd just looked in the grate and seen a magpie. (There's an old portrait of my grandmother waiting for repairs to the frame, and an embroidered firescreen in front of the grate so it's pretty well screened off. He took one look and just put the picture back across.) I was able to grab him with a sheet and put him out the window, after which he flew off to a tree across the road. I'm just glad it was a lot easier and less messy than the last magpie we had a few years back before we moved; maybe the fact that this one was much younger helped. Strange coincidence, though, because we were only talking about birds in work today and I was telling about the last magpie.

Canal - Ancient and Modern

I suppose it's not so ancient, really - work on the Royal Canal started in 1760 and it was completed in 1817.
When the motorway was extended it involved a huge engineering project (1996) to get the canal, railway line and various sewage and water pipes. We have a friend who was studying civil engineering in college a couple of years before this interchange was completed, and he said it was a project that they studied in college. Anyway, when they were upgrading all the motorway interchanges over the last couple of years, that meant even more works. Right now I can't find the photos I took a couple of years ago. I know I took some - we walked down on a snowy day as far as we could go till we hit a dead end at the new interchange. Yesterday we decided to walk down and take another look - now you can once again continue walking along the length of the canal.
It's just strange to have such a green, verdant bank before the Twelfth Lock and the marina, and then have a short passage over the motorway and through a concrete jungle before once again finding yourself in a rural setting and the 11th lock.

I'll have another look for a couple of photos of the incomplete interchange, but right now I'm stiff from 180 miles on the back of C's motorbike on a rather wet and windy day, and a bath is beckoning. Still, it was a good experience - while some of our biking in Greece has been on main roads, most of it has been down side roads and tracks, and it was good to discover that motorway biking may actually be less boring than motorway driving. Except for the wind...

A Great Day

The young great tits somehow don't have the same cute factor as the baby blues. I think it's to do with the masked face the blue tits have - think pandas, raccoons...
But they are certainly very handsome in their pristine plumage and with a creamy yellow belly rather than the brighter yellow adult plumage.

A brief harmonious sharing with young blue and coal tits. Brief is the word!

Two generations

I got to see a Little Grebe in the park this morning, but oh my, little is the word. The battery in my SLR had gone flat, but at least it still gave some magnification to see the detail and come home and work out what it was.  Next time we go I'll bring the spotting scope just in case it's still there - but I've never seen on there before. Watching it diving in among the lilies nearly left me running late as I needed to be home by noon; I was trying to decide what would be the loser if I had to prioritise between the library, the DIY shop for more peanuts and Marks and Spencers. I think it would have been M&S,  but I was glad to have time to do all three as the luxury Charentes butter croissants were in stock, so we have a treat for breakfast tomorrow.

We had a massive thunderstorm with large hail stones - I could see them breaking up as they hit the skylights. I hope all our little birds were well under cover!!

It's Raining Babies

With all the juveniles currently at the feeder, I feel those very scruffy specimens from a couple of weeks back must just have been harried and haggard parents worn to a frazzle trying to keep all those big beaks satisfied. I had a couple of glimpses of a young thrush, too many of a young magpie, and my first sighting of these little baby blue tits. Aren't they so cute!! It was hard to tell how many there might be  - I only ever saw two together at one time, whereas there can be at least four little coal tits clustered on the feeder these days.

I said it was raining - here's the young thrush in the rain:

I'm not sure if I'm anthropomorphizing here, but seeing it standing in the steam rising from the shed roof in the sunshine after a shower, I couldn't help thinking that it looked as if it were taking a sauna.

Top Picks from the Botanics

We were lucky to see the Jade Vine in full bloom again. It seems to be one of those colours that's almost impossible to capture without more post-production than I have time for. This is the third time we've seen it, and probably the most spectacular as some of the tresses were down at eye level. It's some consolation to see, looking at various photos online, that other people too find it hard to capture the colour. Even the first time we saw it, when one of the gardeners gave me some of the fallen flowers to take home, I was never able to get a picture that I felt perfectly captured it.

One of the fly-eating plants - I didn't note the name as it was in a very small and at the time somewhat crowded room at the end of the Orchid House. There was also a series of delightful drawings of the different types of carnivorous plants, with cut-away diagrams showing how they attract and trap insects.

We saw a tortoise down by the lily ponds - the first time in all my years going there that I've seen one, but from the old, flaking shell it's obviously not likely to be a newcomer.

Hail fellow, well met...

Hail - yes.
I walked down along the canal before going to get some bread and vegetables. It had been showery, so I was wearing a raincoat, but I wasn't expecting thunder, lightning and some hail.








I was glad I waited under a sheltering tree and walked on the extra bit to the Twelfth Lock instead of just going straight to the shops - I was rewarded by seeing a mallard with nine little chickies.


Just watch that little laggard scooting over the water. And what amazes me is how dry they are - this was within two minutes of the hail shower. You somehow don't expect those fluffy coats to be waterproof the same way adult plumage is. (Apologies for the wind noise, and also because the roads were wet after the hailstorm there's a lot of road noise from the traffic on the bridge over the canal. I tried some software to compress the video that would have taken the sound out, but I didn't like the result).

Look at them on their journey through the irises growing along the bank - sometimes they were pecking up at the vegetation.

(Sun) Bathing Beauties

By a curious coincidence I just happened to have read in a book about blackbirds enjoying sunbathing. So when I saw one sprawled out on the shed roof last week, my initial thought was that it must have been injured because I hadn't noticed it till I saw it lying there, but my second thought was wondering if it was, in fact, sunbathing. It's not something I've ever seen before. But sure enough, after a while it got up and flew off, perfectly happy. What was funny was the robin joining it for a brief spell in the sun - and since I'd seen it come to look at the blackbird and then flop down, I knew perfectly well it wasn't injured.
After that I saw one in Farmleigh too - it looked like a rag on the ground from a distance. According to the RSPB the sun's warmth is important in helping dislodge feather parasites, and the ultraviolet light in sunlight helps turn birds' preening oil into Vitamin D which helps general good health and is an extra boost for their feathers.

The little coal tits are really quite unafraid at the moment. This picture is un-cropped - up close and personal. Makes for a very shallow depth of field - like a classic soft-focus portrait more than nature photography,  but I love the photo.

Birds

Today was our wedding anniversary. Next year is a big one and hopefully circumstances will permit that we can celebrate in Paris or somewhere special. Today we just went for a walk along the canal in between our main course and dessert to walk off the Procsecco and Yorkshire puddings.
 On the way back we walked part of the way along the road, and spotted this swallow, and an unusual angle on a greenfinch.

 

When we see swallows, C's reflex reaction is to start singing When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano by the Ink Spots (one of the CDs he often listens to while doing the dishes).

The little coal tits are funny - they're happy picking away at the feeder themselves, but when an adult comes along they still like to be fed, too. The first ones in the video, with the more yellow cheeks, are the juveniles.





Rather unintelligently I totally forgot that I had made a card I intended as an anniversary card a couple of months back till after I had made two other possible cards. I decided to keep the original one for my sister later on in the month and gave C this more masculine looking one. Probably a wise decision as he says the other one is more feminine. I did suggest he could give it to me - he gave out enough about the length of time it took for him to find one he was happy to buy on Friday night when he ran out of time and energy to make one himself. But no, he wouldn't give me one of my own cards....