It’s a long time till Christmas

Nevertheless Holly berries are ripening in the hedgerow and if they want to ripen now then now is when we have to photograph them.

So what can I say about Holly that everyone doesn’t already know?

This is Ilex aquifolium commonly called English Holly or European Holly. It is dioecious, which means that there are different male and female trees and you can not tell them apart until they start to flower at four years or later. Sometimes they don’t flower until they are about ten years old.

Obviously you don’t get berries on the male tree. You will only get berries on a female tree if there are some male trees nearby so if you have a Holly tree that doesn’t fruit it may just be lonely.

The fruit is a valuable source of winter food for birds and small mammals but they don’t normally start to eat the berries until there have been a few frosts to soften them. The berries are mildly poisonous to Humans causing rum tum and bum stuff at both ends.

It is a popular Christmas decoration. Did you know that? It keeps Goblins and Devils out of your house too.

Well those berries will have to last a long time because it doesn’t feel like winter here yet. We have had a few days of very nice late summer weather.

We had to make two trips to the Holly to get all of those berry pictures. We couldn’t carry them all on the first trip and then as a special treat I took Fizz up Badger Alley to see how our camera was doing.

No Joy I’m afraid. No unusual monsters. There were Rats and Squirrels. A Sparrowhawk sat in the nest and plucked it’s prey. That should have been an excellent video but it was daytime and the infra red lights came on causing it to be almost a white out. There were plenty of Badgers as you might expect in Badger Alley and prowling around at night in amongst the Badgers was a little ginger Cat.

I know that it is ginger because it made a brief appearance in the daytime. I have left the camera out there because we still haven’t seen what made that nest. I am sure that it is not a Cat nest. 🙂

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…..