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.

A Tale of Tails

One of our robins is moulting at the moment, and has just the stubbiest of little tails. It hasn't affected his aggression and territorial behaviour - he's still chasing the other two (who seem to be a pair) away from the feeder if he gets there first! He looks such a scruffball in comparison to the others.

The cormorant and duck photos were both taken at Heuston Station the other morning.

Corfu Signs

My PC is back up and running again - but it's a bit of a mystery as to what was wrong with it and when it might go wrong again.
So I managed a few quick edits this evening.
More of Corfu town, mostly shop signs. We both liked the steampunk one, which was some sort of book shop - closed, so I couldn't go in and look around.. The antqiuqed scroll sign was another bookshop.

May Favourites

I've been having both computer and internet problems this week, so I haven't got any further with sorting through Corfu photos. They're all safe on an external back-up, but I'm not so fond of editing on the laptop unless I have to, and anyway trying to fix the PC has taken too much energy.

So here are my favourite cards from May! It's taken several years to find a panda stamp I really liked - this one is close to what I have in my imagination.

Loutses Cave

  

For C, one of the highlights of the holiday this year was our trip to Loutses cave, on our way back from Old Perithea. I've attached an image from Google Earth - you can see how barren most of the road up to it is - real karst landscape. A lot of it was one of those ridged concrete roads, not so comfortable on a bike, but probably better for us than for the jeep safari we had seen come off the road earlier on in the day!

So, we climb ever upwards through the bare country, with a couple of pauses to admire the scenery and a bird of prey circling not that far above us (a short-toed eagle, we thought)  and at the end of the road when we could drive no further there was a little half-built shelter, and a foot track leading  into the trees. It's quite amazing - you walk along the track and all of a sudden there was a fairly steep path down, as if we were in a bowl. You can see, from Google Earth, how there's a little patch of woodland right at the top of the mountain/hill (about 480 metres, 1500 feet). There must be a rift in the centre. We clambered down and down, and then reached the entrance to the cave. The roof has plenty of stalactites, and the bottom is a bit damp and covered with green algae.
It had great acoustics for singing, which C made the most of - but it was full of rooks who kept flying out.

                            

View from the top of the mountain.

Entering the wooded area

                                               

Perpendicular tree

Rim of the "bowl"

 `

Cliff face

Looking down to the entrance of the cave (sorry, a bit over-exposed!!)

                              


                            

Looking up out of the mouth of the cave

Definitely a place we'd visit again - and if we do, I'll make sure that I'm wearing my trekking sandals rather than just flip-flops. I managed OK, but trying to pick my way down the path with a camera and camera bag - and my not-so-good head for heights - was just a little precarious. I didn't actually venture much beyond the mouth of the cave.