Barn owl

Finally the sun has come out today and I have been able to get into the garden and to do some harvesting and to water the greenhouse.  Ironic though it seems, that had got very dry.  I have posted some photos of some of the produce (some doing well enough - broad beans, potatoes, beetroot and lettuce of course) on  my Welsh blog and some, like the courgettes and dwarf beans, have not been very happy.

But it is not just the plants that have felt the effect of the wet and cold weather that we have had for so long.  Last Saturday as I walked the dog on the common in a gap between the showers I saw a barn owl hunting.  As it was just around 2.30 in the afternoon, it must have been  desparate to be out hunting at this time in the summer.  The previous night (and I think the one before, too) it had rained very heavily most of the night, and so the owl would not have been able to hunt.  Whilst it was lovely to see it flying, I did not see it catch anything and could only hope that it had some success as perhaps it had young to feed

Whitethroat and late Spring update

Or perhaps it should be summer.  But sitting here on a cold evening and looking out at the rain, it certainly doesn't feel like summer, and the plants don't quite know what to do either.  First we had a lovely early warm spell in March, then a really rainy period, then a hot week or was it even 10 days? not quite I don't think - but long enough for our free draining garden to get very dry, and then just when all the watering had started again, it started to rain and the temperature dropped massively.

Even so, the garden has looked lovely - but it would be good if it were warm enough to hang around in it.  We've had a new visitor though, or perhaps I've just noticed it. My friend Jenny has been over, and we noticed a bird singing that we tried to identify (or rather she did) and I wasn't sure what it was, but on looking it up, thought it might be a whitethroat.  All the features fitted, and the behaviour - perched on top of a tree.  But it is supposed to be a bird that visits woodland heath and scrub, according to a British Garden Birds (but then I suppose there is a clue in the title that it might also visit gardens).  In any case I have not seen it before this year.  And to double check identity I checked the song and recorded its calls, too.

I only wish I had a good enough camera to take photographs of it, (or there might be a pair, I'm not sure yet) but I haven't.

And now we are in June and I have not seen or heard a cuckoo at all this year, though Jim did, a few weeks ago on the common.  Whilst Jenny was here we went to the Hanson nature reserve, which was very peaceful.  The highlight was seeing the Great Crested Grebes' courtship dance - another first for me, and lovely to watch (though a bit late maybe??)

There were many bees around too, on the massive amount of comfrey that grows there and is flowering at the moment - very tall this year with the rain, and much of it has flopped over.  I could see that there were different kinds of bees - but don't know which they are.  I will get out my bee identification chart, but apparently they are not easy to identify.  The photos show one of the little lakes with the flags out in the reserve and a bee on the comfrey

Another first from a few weeks ago was seeing jays flying over the garden to the shrubs and trees beyond.  I have not noticed jays nearby before although I do see them around Milton Keynes.  It just reminded me what pretty birds they are.

Spring update

I am still finding it hard to contribute to this blog as I favour making entries in the other blog http://aildysgu.blogspot.co.uk in order to keep practising and writing in Welsh and just don't find the time for both. Of course, many of the entries are about nature and gardening anyway, although it is always harder writing about them in Welsh.

Over the past few weeks I have seen a barn owl locally – just a passing view, but am told there are a pair down by the old church near the nature reserve, so hope to get along at some point. We saw a yellow hammer on a walk a couple of weeks ago – which are now unusual enough here to warrant a mention. I’m always happy to see lapwings which are not generally frequent in the fields, but do use the spits of land on the flooded gravel pits.

Now that the bird feeder is established in the garden, and the one car, who is now fairly old is not hassling the birds, we are seeing more the garden is now getting a lot more birds, although nothing very unusual. Among the finches we get chaffinches, goldfinches and greenfinches. Great tits, coal tits and blue tits. We have had long tailed tits but they are not around now, and neither are the goldcrests we have seen in previous years, unfortunately. Other visitors are blackbirds, a pair of starlings (which are on the decline apparently), collared doves, wood pidgeons, robins and sparrows (although these are rather occasional). More frequently we see dunnocks and also the occasional wren.

The sighting I have enjoyed most recently was a stoat – although it was rather a short event as it was running across the road.

We now have a hose pipe ban in this area and so the jobs in the garden are getting harder. I do try to be very conscious of water use and always re-use water that I have washed up with (i.e. empty it where it is needed in the garden). Even so, with our large garden, watering all the vegetables by hand is hard work. We don’t water ornamental plants unless they have bee recently planted, and given the dry weather we have not been planting except for the Amelanchier tree to replace the dead cherry that fell on our car in the January gales.

I’m still not very good at identifying trees and the one in the photo is one that has striking flowers coming out when we saw it (a week ago) and I am not sure what it is.