Okay we are still in lockdown & living up here in the wilds, I consider myself very lucky to be surrounded by beautiful countryside, nature at its best & so better off than those poor souls locked away in a high rise flat in the middle of a city.
Mother Nature is sure putting on a show at this time of the year, though we are having some cold days, mainly due to the North winds, the daytime has mainly been sunny & though like farmers we always find something to moan about weather wise it is a cracking Spring. We have not seen rain for sometime & none is forecast for a week or so and that is making it hard for the gorgeous spring plants, but a gentle watering in the evening is helping them to keep giving us a magnificent show.
The birds are really active, chasing mates & defending their territories especially our Dunnocks, there must either be a shortage of females or a surplus of males, as you cannot go 5 minutes without seeing or hearing a dispute amongst them.
Today is a wind free even warm day, even had lunch & lunchtime snooze out in the garden, which is a first for the year. One advantage of such a day is plants stay still to get some decent shots of them & we have the emergence of butterflies & bees. One thing I must confess I am not very good on my insect identification, leave that to my youngest son who goes miles to locate a certain type of butterfly or moth & though I of course taught him everything about photography, he takes far better photos than me of such things.
If I had to choose where I would want to spend lockdown then I would not change from where I live now. We can go for our daily exercise up the glen or even down to the village & not see a soul, no self caterers in the holiday lets, nobody looking at an O.S. map & not having a clue where they are, just us locals, keeping in touch but socially isolating a bit more than normal.
Forgot to mention we never have sheep with us during the winter, they go off somewhere a bit warmer or less bleak, but this week they have returned to our field, roughly 100 of them & so good to see.(still a bit of snow on the hills)
The view looking the other direction to the sheep showing what a lovely day it is.
A closer view of yonder hills.
Greater Spotted Woodpecker, a regular visitor to the garden, either on the peanuts or eating from the jar of peanut butter which it loves & always goes up to this branch to wipe the surplus of his beak. (You can tell it is a male by the red bit on it’s neck.)
Male House Sparrow calling for a mate to come to the nest box hotel, the box it is standing on, plus the one above , have 3 sections in each as these birds love to nest in a colony. We never had any House Sparrows here when we moved in & over the years have slowly built up our own colony last year they used 5 nest boxes, two in the hotel block, one above my bedroom window, one in an artificial House martins nest & one on the end of the garage. Noisy whatsits in the summer early morning, but worth it.
Finally on the bird front, my wife’s favourite bird the Wren, seems now to be in the habit of arriving at the pond 5.30ish each evening , having a bath & disappearing again, must be a female to have such a set routine.
As I said do not ask me to tell you which species this is, eventually my son will answer my email & tell me.
How full of Spring is this a lovely little butterfly on Primroses, plus sunshine, perfect combination.
I know back to the last topic, but on a sunny day daffs certainly shine out & cheer you up, along with the other Spring flowers of course.
Hope this has cheered you all up, unless you are stuck in that flat, but we will all get through this if we obey the rules & try & smile each day. At least if you are in that flat, you have not got the long list of outdoor jobs my Mrs has been giving me:-
Workshop tidied. (tick)
Rotten gate fixed. (tick)
Lawn fertiliser down. (tick)
Blood, Fish & Bone on the shrubs. (tick)
Still to do :-
Mow lawns, tidy woodshed, chainsaw next winters wood pile, the list is never ending. 🙂