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.