Sorry I haven’t posted here in ages!
I took a couple of pics yesterday I quite like, so I thought I’d share those.
Five spot burnet moth, and roosting bees, on allium flower heads.
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Hi all
It’s been a while!
The garden bed I posted about last was finished. Nothing much else new, except that we have frogspawn again! 😀
Click images to enlarge
This year a few things have distracted me from the garden, but I did enjoy watching the frogs this spring. They had spawn again, and more than last year. I posted on twitter, but in case you don’t follow me there, here are a few photos.
Hello, it’s been a while.
I’m just going to jump in with a little video, this is what the garden currently looks like:
As you can see spring is starting to fill everything in. The highlights right now are the cowslips, and the mass of tadpoles in the pond 🙂
We continue to have plenty of garden birds and some hedgehogs. We also have a little wood mouse who keeps nicking the hedgehog food! The cats love to watch it zip about on the patio.
I hope to get back into the swing of posting regularly, but we’ll see what happens.
A reminder of hedge cutting law regarding birds
Hedges require regular attention, but they are best cut from September to February – outside of the nesting season and less likely to disturb nesting birds. All UK birds are protected from harm under the Wildlife and Countryside act 1981.
The RSPB website says:
“We recommend cutting hedges and trees is avoided between March and August as this is the main breeding season for nesting birds.
It is an offence under Section 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 to intentionally take, damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while it is in use or being built.”
As I do every year, I participated in the RSPB’s big garden birdwatch last week.
As usual the birds seemed to know, I have no idea where all my sparrows went…
Here are my results:
Blackbird 5
Sparrow 1
Robin 1
Dunnock 1
Woodpecker 1
Wood pigeon 1
Collared dove 2
Blue tit 1
Coal tit 1
Goldfinch 7
Chaffinch 2
What did you see?
Don’t forget to submit your results if you haven’t already! Do it HERE.
Following my previous post I have deleted photos from Flickr myself so that I am the one deciding what goes and not flickr. I’ve tried to keep photos that help tell the story of my garden. I might move them elsewhere at some point, I don’t know.
This means there are lots of images missing from the blog now, and I’m gradually going to replace them. If there are any particular posts you think should be prioritised, please say. I’ve done some of the wildlife articles already – hedgehogs and bees.
I’m trying to find the positives… My photos probably did need sorting out.
I was feeling a bit blue but I found some motivation to do some gardening today – just collecting leaves and a bit of pruning, and I’m so glad I did.
Not only was it nice out – not really cold, and lovely sunshine making our birches look golden with the yellow and orange leaves all lit up – but we had a surprise visit.
I’ve been sad that I’ve not been seeing a lot of wildlife lately.. our hedgehogs are missing, I’ve been doing the BTO owl survey and not hearing owls (I have before), and the birds seem to have been feeding elsewhere.. BUT today, just as we were about to prune, I noticed quite a few birds in the birches. Instead of carrying on I have a look and there’s a whole flock of long tailed tits! 😀
We don’t see long tails very often so this was a lovely treat and really brightened my day. But on only did we have long tails, but I noticed at least two gold crests in there as well – double treat!!! There were also blue tits, coal tits, and a great tit. AND a woodpecker popped by, though we have been seeing the woodpeckers every day.
It was a glorious ten minutes or so while we just stood and watched 🙂
Flickr, where I share and host my photos, have decided to change how they do things now they’re under new management.
Money is tight so I downgraded to a free account a little while ago (after years of paying for a pro account), knowing I’d have a terrabyte of space, but now I’ll only be allowed 1000 photos (I have over 4000). So from January (or sooner as I try to sort things out) many of my photos on the blog will vanish.
This will impact the blog, and it’s very disappointing. I’ve been on flickr for a very long time and now I face the task of trying to find elsewhere to host my photos that allow embedding and trying to figure out which photos I’ve used here and get them uploaded and all the links changed..
It’s going to take so long I don’t know if I’ll be able to motivate myself to do it.
So.. sorry if the blog looks less after January.
SolariaHues 