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.

All about Today

This is just going to be a run down of what we have been up to the last few days and some hints of what is to come. It is going to be a bit of a messy post.

First, it has been raining. The last couple of days it has been pretty much heavy rain from dawn to dusk, without any let up.

I thought that I had a new Woodpecker in the garden.

I got all excited and started snapping away and then realised it is the same bird, she is just wet.

It is strange that there is no male visiting.

This is where a pair of Swallows are nesting.

The Swallow’s chicks have hatched. The adults have been flying out of the nest with little sacks of bird droppings in their beaks, splattering the farm yard with them. I can hear the excited little chorus of cheeps now when the adults return to the nest.

Nothing to see yet, that is still to come.

I have had Fizz living with me for a few days. Her owner had gone away and asked me to pop in and feed her twice a day. She is not allowed in my flat.

Well, I couldn’t leave her alone all day. I sneaked her upstairs, it wasn’t difficult as I had the farm to myself and no-one will ever find out.

Our walks have been pretty subdued as there was not a lot going on in the rain. More play than photography.

That all changed this morning when for a good few hours the sun shone.

Look at these golden fields.

Not dandelions this time but Meadow Buttercups

The Badger Track is filling up with Creeping Buttercup and so I see a Buttercup post coming up.

Here are a couple of animals that I photographed. I don’t know what either of these are but I will do very soon and then I will do little posts about them.

The first is a spider and I have been trying to get it for about a week.

Until today this was about the best shot that I had.

I got a lot of good shots when I found one out in the open today.

That one is in the bag.

The second one is a fly. I haven’t got a clue what species but I got good pictures and it is very distinctive, so I should be able to sort this one out pretty soon too.

There can’t be many flies made out of marzipan.

This next fly I know well. This golden maned predator goes by the unfortunate misnomer of The Yellow Dung Fly.

He is like an old friend and so I find myself quite embarrassed to walk in on him like this.

Do you think he looks a bit like Robert de Niro?

If you were a fly and you had to choose would you choose Robert De Niro or Rudolf Nureyev? I mean just suppose you were a fly and you had to choose.

Or..

(Rudolf Nureyev’s part  was played by Sicus ferrugineus a thick headed fly)

Moving on…

English Oak, Quercus robur.

Now that they are in leaf these trees look magnificent  but see that little tree in the next picture, on the floor beside the Oak, that’s an Ash tree.

The little Ash tree that stands alone in the middle of the field still hasn’t got it’s leaves on.So I am trying to finish up in the fields now.

One last little flower and it is Red Clover again.

Red Clover is not just a good looking flower it is also good to eat. It has got to have it’s own foraging post.

Now that’s a pretty picture but you can’t eat the Buttercups. They are poisonous, not fatal but can make you very ill and they taste foul. The worst poisons are concentrated in the yellow petals, let’s get rid of them….

That should be the end of this post but Fizz and I went out again in the afternoon, down the badger track this time.

It was absolutely lovely, everything is covered in Hawthorn blossom , like confetti at a wedding.

We were out for a reason. Treacle hunting. There were still plenty  about despite the rain.

There are now five caterpillars in the Treacle-arium. I brought two small ones back with me this morning and I wasn’t going to have any more but this evening I found some really nice big specimens that I couldn’t resist and so I collected two of them as well. But that is a story for another post

My hands and arms are tingling tonight from all of the playing with Stinging Nettles.

Now I have got to go and do some nature detective work so goodnight.

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…..