Garden Update…

I thought a garden update might be in order as I haven’t posted for a while.

In late April the blue tits laid their eggs and now we have little fluff ball juveniles in the garden. 🙂

Here’s an adult on our feeding station pole.

Sparrowhawk

Last week we had a sparrowhawk in the garden; a regular visitor and a supreme ambush predator.

The sparrowhawk uses the trees at the bottom of the garden to spot and prey on either house sparrows, starlings and other smaller birds/mammals. Now that the trees are in full leaf it finds it easier to get its prey from the gardens around where I live.

This time of year they look for more food as it’s egg laying time and unfortunately this adult starling was lunch for this young adult bird.

Spring

Spring is here at last and over the last couple of weeks here in the UK we have had some wonderful weather (well 2 weeks ago that is, I’m a bit late in posting 🙂 ).

The garden has been in bloom with the first flowers coming through (although we do have winter growing flowers), the leaves on our big trees making a welcome appearance and getting seeds planted in the greenhouse for the veggie plot. 🙂

In the greenhouse we have lettuce, tomatoes, runner beans and cucumber plants.

If you look at the nearest tray the lettuce making an appearance, the far trays are tomatoes but they take a bit longer to show.

The Big Garden Birdwatch 2018

At the end of January each year is the annual Big Garden Birdwatch survey which is organized by the RSPB (sorry this is only available in the UK). It is the biggest wildlife participation event of its kind and if you’ve read this blog before you will know I enjoy it and take part too. 🙂

Weird Weather

Today (Monday the 16th October) in the UK we have had ex-hurricane “Ophelia” battering parts of Ireland, Northern Ireland and some other parts of the UK.

I live in the Southeast corner of England and we have had some strange weather conditions created by the ex-hurricane.

As you can see the photographs of the sun is extremely red and it appears very dark although it was only 3:30 or so in the afternoon when I took this.

Garden Update

Now that we’re in Autumn or Fall things are moving on in the garden and the little jobs that I have been doing are now getting bigger.

Our autumn flowering plants are out and the honey bees and some bumblebees are loving them still.

You can see the pollen bags are full to the brim on this honey bee. 🙂

About Time for a Blog

Hello, it’s been a while since I posted and there are a lot of things that have been going on.

First things first, I must apologize for not updating you; a family member died suddenly, I was shocked and didn’t really feel like blogging, after that a close family friend had a life saving operation on her heart recently, so it’s been a bit frantic (especially for an introvert like me).

I do have some pictures for you that were taken some time ago and have been edited though.

These two photographs are of a male Kestrel near where I live. 🙂

They are fabulous birds of prey and I wish that I could have managed to get a photograph of them hovering as they are looking for prey.

This squirrel was a visitor in our garden throughout the summer, I left out a supply of nuts in the tree and it didn’t seem to come to any of the feeders and pinch the birds or other mammal food that I left out. 🙂

I will try in the coming weeks to get a more updated blog out about the garden; I hope everyone is enjoying the late summer/autumn?

 

Deer Park

I went to a large park a couple of weeks ago; it was back when we had temperatures over 30 degrees or roughly 93 fahrenheit (for those of you who use that form of measure of heat). Fortunately I went early in the day so I didn’t get the massive heat and I also stayed pretty much in the shade wearing my large brimmed hat and lots of sun cream. 🙂

I thought I would share some pictures of the deer there.

This young female was keeping cool in the heat, although you can’t see there’s a pond just to the right of the photograph.

Big Garden Birdwatch 2017 (my results)

Over this last weekend and indeed today has been the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch. This is a great citizen science project to see how the state of the birds of the UK’s gardens are doing. I really enjoy taking part in this and have done for a good while now. 🙂

All you need is to count the most amount of each single species of bird in your garden over a period of an hour.

Here’s a picture of a robin taken just after my count.

Birdy Fun in the Cold

It’s been fairly cold in the south of the UK where I live, or at least cold for this part of the country. This has allowed me to get in lots of practice with my new lens over the last week or so even though the light on some occasions has been low and not very good to shoot photographs in.

This was taken yesterday afternoon.