Last month I thought Spring was well on it’s way, how wrong was I. As you will see from the shots below we have had some very different weather for the first two weeks of this month. What has been consistent however has been a bitterly cold, strong wind , where down the hill in the village friends have told me hardly any wind, one of the few disadvantages of living high up the hills. We get the views & we get the peace but you have to put up with the rough & the smooth. One advantage of living up here in a small hamlet where most of us are, let’s say, getting on in years, is that all of us have had our first jab (or jag as they call it up here), just gives you that added bit of health security. Lets hope soon we will be able to get out & about a bit more & explore the lovely surrounds of the Cairngorms again & who knows maybe get a coffee out.
I hope you enjoy this first half of March photos & lets wait & see what the second half will bring us.
Let us start the month with a sunny Spring shot, one hundred yards down the road from us growing besides a small stream are these bright & cheerful Aconites basking in the ever warming sunshine, a real pick you up as you walk past them.
Another sure sign of Spring, every year about this time of the year the field in front of the house gets full of these Crows, they are a very clever bird & methodical in what they do. They land beside piles of horse manure & turn it over section by section, finding worms & creatures to eat, Presumably building up their reserves for sitting on the nest during breeding season. It is not until you enlarge a shot like this do you actually realise just how big their beaks are.
On this third day of march we realised that winter has not left us yet. We woke up to a temperature of minus 5C, with freezing fog. I could see that the Birch trees nearby were white with moisture that had frozen on the branches, So I was a bit quicker doing my ablutions, eating breakfast & feeding the birds, but as usual by the time I got in the car & headed a few miles up the road to a Birch wood, the frost had gone off & I just had to be contend with this misty shot, which I still liked.
It might be cold again but the families of House Sparrows that we have “cultivated” to live up here have started nest building, the first thing they do is clean out last years nest material. So of course we know when they are building as the paths around the house get covered in old grass, feathers, sheep’s wool etc. This is one of the males giving me the “how dare you take my photo ” looks.
Of course these are not growing in the garden , those ones are only just out of the ground. These are M&S specials, miniature Daffs growing in a pot that really cheer you up on the kitchen window.
Just to show you it is still cold, I must have left the tap slightly on when I filled the bird baths the night before & initially the watering can was joined by ice to the tap, unfortunately (as usual) by the time I was washed & dressed to go outside it had melted off the tap. Lesson learnt, always take the shot when you first see it, even if in your dressing gown & get as frozen as the tap.
The wife has just completed this jigsaw & no the pencil was not in the picture, we just placed it on the map to show exactly where our house is. The field on which the pencil is placed is where the horses are & where we saw the deer last month and also where the Crow from the earlier shot was feeding. Only one major fault with the jigsaw it does not show just how hilly the area is, the ground at the rubber end of the picture is a good 100 ft lower than us with a hill in between.
By now you will have known that I love photographing clouds, though this was an unusual one to wake up to. First glance it looks like an atomic blast mushroom over the hills towards Rannoch, not a great shot from me , but I had only just opened the curtains. Place it on a local photography forum with the heading “Hope Rannoch is okay” & gave a few people a laugh.
Walked up the hill from us hoping to see some new born lambs to put on here but they were way over the far side of the field so spotted a pair of Lapwings & captured this shot instead of the lambs, just love that crest on their heads.
Overnight we had some very gusty wind, like most of the country had & scattered around the garden were last years seed heads from the climbing Clematis. These seed heads stay attached normally until this years growth starts & as they are some 25 to 30 feet up a Silver Birch I cannot normally reach them, so took this opportunity to photograph them. On placing them on the Canon Forum I straight away got comments that the left hand one looks like Boris Johnsons hair, maybe this is what he styles himself on, after all seed head does suit him with a reported 9 children.
I do love my cows & this little beauty is no exception, though it looks a bit sad, it was happy with the rest of the herd in with it. I realise that in an earlier blog I featured cows a lot, but this herd seems a new batch so i thought you wouldn’t mind me including it (sorry never checked the sex, so have to say “it”). As I intend to take a different subject shot each day I wont include the rest of the herd in later months (promise). Though sorry that criteria does not include bird species as my hope, by the end of the year, is to include every species that I see in my garden.
Here we go again. All this talk of Spring that I have been talking about & what do we wake up to today, more white “stuff”. I do hope you appreciate the dedication I am putting into these shots, I realised that the day was forecast as being sunny, so as I drew back the curtains and saw this I thought it might melt quickly. Therefore out true grit I threw on a dressing gown & went out & took this shot, blooming cold I can assure you, but for you, I would do anything (well almost) to get my daily shot.
Bit better than yesterday, still a cold Northerly wind but able to get out & about in the garden before rushing in for a warm up & brew. Not only is this the best year so far for Snowdrops, we are surrounded with a wonderful show of Catkins. These are on just one years growth as I cut our Hazel back last year & though the shoots only stand 7-8feet tall they are covered in Catkins, where normally we would only see a few when we had coppiced the growth.
We had four horses in the field in front of us which stay in the field for the time that the sheep are not with us. Unfortunately early last week the very old white horse, that has been slower & slower walking the field, died, which was sad because being slow it was also very gentle, compared to the others. Now with the remaining three I felt sorry for them & bought some carrots just as a treat for them, so today I called them up to our edge of the field & (as I am not brave enough to feed them by hand) threw the three carrots into the field, but this one in the shot managed to find all three & ate them all before the others got a look in, then turned towards me with those eyes & said “well have you not got any more for me”, well that’s how I interoperated his whinny.
Now as you know I am not the gardener of the household & if you had asked ME what this close of a plant was I would not have a clue. Due to this hunt for a different shot each day I am discovering the beauty of such things as this plant. Some of you will have guessed it is in fact one of the many different varieties of Heather we have in the garden. In fact I was very lucky to locate it, for as I told you last month we had a visit to the garden by a Roe Deer & they are very partial to Heathers & it munched it’s way through a fair number of them in the garden & this was one of the few untouched.
If it was left to me our garden would be full of Heathers, trees, grass & maybe a few shrubs, because they are all very low maintenance plants & that would suit me fine. But as I am married to a green fingered genius, we have a lot more variety in the garden than that. Most probably going to be a saviour for this photo challenge taking shots of different ones throughout the year.
Now outside that challenge last blog I showed you a miniature Iris in bud & promised I would show you it in bloom, so in addition to my challenge, here it is.
