Fit Bird (Red Pants) In the Shower

So I lied? Get me arrested, why don’t you? 🙂 🙂 🙂

I am having a duvet day. 🙂

Pink Pants

I took so many pictures of this juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker today it is really going to need two posts. I love the delicate pink lingerie.

The “There’s A New Sheriff In Town,” GSW

Do you feel lucky?

No birds were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Her Red Pantaloons

She has got babies but she wont show me.

All she wants to do is kick up her legs and show me her lingerie.

Stupid Bird! We all know what colour knickers you’ve got on.

Please, please, please bring your babies to my camera.

Thank you doesn’t seem like a big enough word. What took you so long?

Now I am happy. There will be much more of this to come.

Now I have just got to add in some pictures of the male bird to make up the set and we will be done.

You will notice that he um… He likes to wear his wife’s underwear but he is a bird, let’s not be judgemental.

These have got to be the most photogenic birds in the garden.

My Juvenile Obsession

I am sorry about the quality of these pictures, they were taken around 5:30 this morning and the light was pretty poor.

So at 5:30 this morning Mum brought two juveniles to the feeder. By six o’clock I had my coffee and the camera was set up to catch the action on video….

They didn’t come back and I gave up at nine this evening.

This video is the best that I got today. It is just the female but from the way she is taking food away I think that she must have had a young one nearby.

I ended up watching the lambs in the orchard.

A fruitless day but she is going to bring her young to the feeder and when she does I am going to photograph and film it and then I will be able to get on with other stuff.

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…..