April Showers

C was pretty wet when he got home too. He'd put on all his waterproof gear in the morning and didn't really need it, so he decided to take a chance on the way home. I saw this little robin just when C drove his bike into the back yard.
But at last we have a little warmth! I've taken a gamble and planted a few seeds...

Spring?

One quick photo from a visit to Farmleigh yesterday, because this one needs no editing.
It was cold enough, I don't think temperatures rose much above 8C (46, 27 F), but in the sunshine it was WARM.
And it was sunny! We woke up early, so I cooked the German Apple Pancake for breakfast and still had time to potter around a little before we went to Farmleigh (which doesn't open till ten). There is a Japanese Festival tomorrow, and I felt so sad for them because all the cherry trees behind the Boathouse Café and along the edge of the lawn where they had sited some marquees were as bare as bare could be. And the magnolias are still all tightly cased in their fuzzy  - what do you call them?
There weren't even as many daffodils as usual, but the scilla was out all over.

March cards

Two of my favourite cards for March are Christmas cards, so I won't post them here...
It felt like an unproductive month, especially when there was a week that I didn't make any cards at all while we were dog-sitting, but I find I have quite a few favourites.
The first one is Serendipity Squares - a messy technique from way back but always fun. The third one is done with Couleur d'Art pencils, which I've had for years. How did it take me this long to learn that they acat as a resist with inks, so I can colour and then sponge the background without worrying about masking?  I got a set of 24 a long time ago when I worked in import and distribution of fine art supplies - the box of 48 was never in stock when I wanted it. 24 is limiting, though - so a large box of pencils is coming my way later this month.

Spring?

Well, Easter has been and gone, along with one of the coldest Marches on record.
Not too much chocolate here for Easter - but an eggy surprise when I was doing fried eggs for a bunch and found two double-yolkers. Not much time for fancy photography because I like my yolks runny!

 

A male siskin has joined the female at the feeders - and his colours are so vibrant. My book says they are the same size as the goldfinches, but this one looks slightly smaller to me. C is still lamenting that he hasn't managed to spot a waxwing anywhere, but the siskin is a good runner-up consolation prize.

The redpolls are also back, although not in as large numbers as a couple of years ago. Hopefully more will be along - they're fun to watch.

And the squirrel is up to his usual acrobatics. When I spotted him using the bracket for holding the water dish to balance on, I moved it further down the pole, but of course that didn't deter him!

I had to put some poison down when I saw a rat under the feeder. While I could do without the squirrel, I'm quite glad that he hasn't gone the same way as the rat(s).

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.

St. Patrick

I found a different photo for St. Patrick's Day this year - the coat of arms over the door of St. Patrick's University Hospital.  Founded in 1746 with a bequest from Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral it was one of the first hospitals to be planned and designed as a specialist psychiatric hospital.

I also have a couple of pictures of a city worker painting out graffiti on a gate. I like the first photo, but it needs the second one to put it in context.

Quick Picks

We've had bitterly cold weather this week, some snow, some grey skies and some lovely sunshine - mostly in the mornings.
The snow never actually lay on the ground that long, and on Monday it was so windy that what little there was formed drifts, leaving open green spaces and sudden white patches.

This photo is our neighbour's roof, where it looked like a fine dusting of icing (confectioners) sugar.

A quick snap of one of the robins. I was planting some sweetpea seedlings into pots the other day, and the robins were in heaven because they found a treasure-trove of worms underneath the sack of potting soil!

I'm not sure if this is some type of breeding plumage on the cormorant. I need to look back over older photos. It was the red splash that first caught my eye - and then I saw how much white there was on the head - as if he'd been sprinkled with snow too! The other day, for the first time ever, I saw not just one or two of them but six all perched on the wall across the road from Heuston Station. Digital zoom, so slightly more pixellated than I like.

And a fine black-headed gull.

Google are terminating Reader! How can they do that!! I'll have to find another programme before the clock runs out.

Cards

...and just finished reading: The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Hoeg. I picked it up in the library recently, because I had read and quite enjoyed Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow when it came out. C took a vague look at the book and dismissed it as not for him. But after he heard me giggling away here and there as I was reading it, he gave it a go, and it was my turn to hear him chuckling away. We renewed it again and passed it on to his mother who said she enjoyed it so much and she too laughed a lot. (Never having been over 5 foot even at her tallest, and now probably a couple of inches less, I think she really enjoyed the description of the short grandmother standing on things to reach the kitchen table). It was a strange book, slightly surreal (it reminded me of Sophie's World), but thoroughly enjoyable.

Favourite cards for February:

City Heron

Just a few very quick edits from Monday morning. It's hard to believe that the photo with the old shopping trolley and the reflections of the bridge was taken barely fifty metres from the others, which are right in front of Heuston Station.

Birds

Lots of photos in some glorious sunshine this morning. But Monday is a very busy day for me, and I won't have time to edit them till later on in the week.
But I have a few from the garden  - some we don't often see.
First up is a female blackcap, and with a sparrow. We've seen the male quite a bit, but this is the first time I've seen the hen.

Wow - some change in colour cast over the days - although also the first photo was taken through the window, and the second from outside. We don't often see long-tailed tits on the feeders. They're so comical with their tiny little bodies and stubby heads and those long tails. I've been seeing a lot of them round the place recently, and they always make me smile.

A siskin - female, I think. It's only the second time I've seen one ever. The first time was rather fraught on two counts; it was when my mother was dying, and we'd gone over to my sister for the afternoon for some time out and a break from the hospital, and one of her cats caught a siskin so she went tearing out to scare the cat before he damaged the bird. I'm pretty sure the bottom photo, with the goldfinches, is a siskin too, but I'm going to check that with my sister.

Not at home, although we have two hen and one male blackbird who are now regular visitors and fly in every time they hear me whistle for the robin. It's getting a bit like trying to feed two dogs who want to eat from each others bowls!! This one was in a tree along the canal bank. I enjoyed waching him while I waited at the level crossing for the barriers to go up.

And finally, this  is one from this morning. I often see a couple of grey wagtails flitting across the Liffey - usually I hear them first and know to look for the flash of yellow. This morning there were five of them, and instead of flying further and further away, a couple of them actually flew closer, and one landed on the wall quite near me.

We have at last had some welcome sunshine - not done with the grey weather yet and it's still bitterly cold in the wind, but oh, blue skies are a tonic!