Starvelings in the Storm

You have probably heard about the aftermath of Hurricane Bertha bearing down on the UK, it must have made the world news, no?

Well it rained a bit in the night.

I just wanted to let you know that we survived.

This is how bad it got…. The Birds nearly starved.

They are demanding little animals.

Now the sun is breaking through and I am going out to photograph some flowers in the rain.

How to eat peanuts with one chopstick.

It  has been so hot here that the bottom fell out of our peanut feeder. I am guessing that the wire expanded and our trustworthy feeder suddenly failed.

I had to modify it.

That seems to have done the trick.

Now the birds have to learn how to use chopsticks. It is not as easy as it looks. The young ones seem to be getting the hang of it though. It is just a question of balance.

These young Great Tits are one of my garden favourites at the moment, they look so cute.

Fit birds in the shower

Sorry about that, this is a nature blog. I was just trying to boost my stats. I won’t do it again 🙂 🙂 🙂

We have had a thunderstorm rumbling on since half past four this morning, it’s about one o’clock now. What can you do?

I have just had a Robin in  going through my cupboards and telling me that I forgot to put any worms out this morning.

I did put worms out, I don’t know where they have gone.

Cooking with Colin

It is not very nice out today and so we are in the kitchen doing some cooking.

I am a good cook. My lasagne is “to die for” and guests are always telling me that I should open a restaurant.

I should be so stupid. I did look at taking on a “Greasy Spoon” once except… Do you know what a Full Repairing and Insurance lease is?

My friend didn’t when the owners of the cafe she worked in said that they wanted to chuck it all in and move abroad. Her partner had inherited some money and she had virtually been running that cafe herself for the past three years. A perfect opportunity. Within a month her insurers had explained that the property needed 15 thousand pounds of work before they could renew the insurance and the old owners had moved abroad with all of her money.

Leases are funny things and running a cafe doesn’t really have much to do with food.

Today I am going to show you how to cook one of my signature dishes, “Half a Coconut of Scraps”

Hygiene is probably the most important thing in the kitchen and I recommend sterilising your coconut shell with a kettle full of boiling water after giving it a good wash.

Do this until your camera lens steams up and that should be sufficient.

As for ingredients well, Ideally you would just use lard and kitchen scraps. That is very, very cheap but it melts in the summer sun. I add about a half of one of those little ball things that you can buy by the bucket load and that seems to fix the melting problem.

So next you have to melt your fats. I use a pan. You could probably get away with just using a warm part of your body, lard melts quite easily but a pan works for me and it is not messy.

Finally, you put your stuff in the coconut, let it cool and then pop it in the fridge for a bit. I sometimes put mine in the freezer if it is a hot day.

The difficulty level for this recipe is no more than moderate. Anyone who can bake a loaf of bread or prepare a lasagne from scratch would have no problem with this dish. It should feed between 50-100.

Now for the acid test….

Yes! I believe that dinner has been a success and I feel a great sense of relief and achievement as I always do in these moments.

(Next recipe: Badger nuts with Raisins)

Just a Redbreast

Hi, I wanted to have a crack at the garden birds this evening but at the end of the day the light just wasn’t good enough and this little Robin was all that I could manage.

Yellow Cheeks

Before I start this post let me just explain the significance of the yellow cheeks to everybody who doesn’t know or have the Eurasian Blue Tit locally (most of the world really)

In the UK the Blue Tit is a common garden bird. Very neat and tidy it is a pretty little thing much loved for it’s acrobatics on the bird feeder.

It looks like this.

No it doesn’t really (not all the time) I’m just joking with you.

This is an adult blue tit.

Newly fledged birds have yellow cheeks.

Blue Tits have a large brood, it can be as many as fifteen but eight to ten is more common. They take a lot of feeding, each little bird needs about a hundred caterpillars a day, so the parents are kept very busy. They have to find all that food on top of looking after themselves. A wet Spring can be devastating for Blue Tits, they only have one brood and if it rains at the wrong time they can’t find enough insect food and the chicks die.

We have had a very wet Spring this year and so I have been watching the feeder for a couple of weeks now looking out for those little yellow cheeks.

Fed up with fetching home an extra thousand caterpillars a day the parent birds are very keen to bring their young to the feeder and teach them how to get their own dinner.

You have to get it through to them that this isn’t just a place where you come to be fed now that you are an adult. This is a place where you come to feed yourself!

There are no more free lunches.

So this is what you do. You pick the food up… Wait……Then you put it in your mouth and you swallow it!

Okay?

One more time. How hard can it be? Pick it up and eat it!

You’re on your own.

What are we supposed to do? Did you follow any of that?

Hello Baby. I am so glad to see that you made it. It is going to be a long hot summer now and you will soon get the hang of it.

Suppose that it wasn’t Raining

If it wasn’t raining I expect that we would have Long Tailed Tits on the feeder.

I am very fond of Long Tailed Tits.

Hungry little birds.

Moulin Rouge in my Garden

Female Great Spotted Woodpecker:

Just call me Shorty.

Quite a few pictures I’m afraid but…

When a beautiful lady in exotic lingerie puts herself in front of my eyes I am going to look and I need to look at everything.

The way her shoulder hangs, the nape of her neck, everything.

You can can look at her pretty red underpants if that is what tickles your fancy. She won’t mind.

Click on any picture to enlarge it and let your eyes linger.

Ha Ha! Excuse me, from the hundreds of photographs that I took I narrowed it down to just seventy and now I am just trying to see which ones I can live without…

Nope, I need that one, need that one……

This might be quite a long post.

Finished and that was only thirty six pictures, I threw loads away.

She is in the garden again this morning and I have already taken more than a hundred pictures of her. I know, throw them away, don’t even look at them.

We don’t want this to become the Woody Woodpecker Show.

She is just so lovely that I find her very hard to resist.

Anyway, jobs to do. We can have woodpeckers again when the male comes to visit.

Later beautiful bird.

The Joy of Nuts

Great Spotted Woodpecker: 6:30 This morning.

It’s my nuts, it’s my nuts…

GO AWAY!

It’s my nuts, it’s my nuts…

Where is the sunshine when you need it?

 

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..