Three good things....and garden wildlife

This is how our poached egg plants (liminanthes douglasii) looked over the Bank Holiday weekend - it is a wonderful plant that is not in flower very long, and is an annual that I just allow to set seed in the vegetable garden and then pull out. It attracts hover flies to start with and then a little later on, as above, it attracts bees. The honey bees in our garden have not been doing so well so it is lovely to see them looking well and feeding on the poached egg plants.

Over the last three days, I've had three "sightings" that I've enjoyed. The first, on Sunday, was the hares again. I say again - but who knows if they were the same hares? However, they were in the same place, so it seems likely to me. But this time, there were three hares - or rather, six pairs of ears. It was rather difficult to see the hares properly as the corn is now growing quite fast (much better than my own sweet corn I might add) and so most of the hares could not be seen - except for their ears. But once I had seen them, I did see their heads and some of their bodies as they moved around.

Then yesterday, cycling home after some much wetter conditions than of late, I saw some black and white birds on the cricket pitch at Willen village. This is where the magpies congregate - in very large numbers. (They must be increasing at quite a rate I think - we used to look out for the second when we saw one when I was a child - now I frequently see 10 or 12 or more at a time...) But these were not magpies, they were oystercatchers. Nothing unusual about that - except the location. Willen, in my experience, does not host many oystercatchers. The last I saw locally was one flying over Bury Common in Newport Pagnell about a year ago. These two were probing in the wet grass - and were still there this morning.

My last treat was as I was leaving work at the Open University around 6.30 and noticed a brown squattish bird as I was cycling past the football pitch. Looks like an owl I thought and started to carry on.........then realised that this was a bit unusual and also wanted to see whether it was indeed an owl. So I turned the bike round and went to walk onto the pitch. The bird had been quite still - and I wondered if it was injured - or fairly newly fledged. As I got a bit closer it flew off into a nearby tree and undfortunately I had no binoculars with me, but it was clearly a tawny owl - I supsect a fairly young bird perhaps not long out of the nest. So it was quite a happy person that continued their cycle home through the grey early evening - and then on the lane, I saw and heard a chiff-chaff. Again nothing very unusual except that I am only just starting to learn about warblers. I've always found small brown or greenish brown birds tricky to identify - like lots of other people - and as for warblers, have never even tried, until I paid some attention to a radio 4 programme last year that was about warbler songs. And I think I do now recognise a chiff chaff call - and the bird calling certainly looked like one to me. So a good few days considering it is fairly wet and miserable - though the rain was desparately needed for the garden.

And on a different note - here is some of the wildlife from the garden

Upland birds and water birds

We spent the weekend in Conwy, which is a great place for seeing waders, (and buying Welsh books – from Llandudno and Caernarfon – see my forthcoming Welsh blog) as the estuary has quite extensive mudflats when the tide is out. I now know that oystercatchers do not stop feeding at night as we could see and hear them after dark, and I also watched one feeding this morning – and realised I had not done that before. This particular bird was finding mussels (which are plentiful in the harbour) and seemed to be dunking them in the water before prising out the mussel and eating it (it seemed to be almost slurping it up in its beak- think of a person eating spaghetti and you will be close). Other estuary inhabitants included many curlews, shelduck (see photo) and redshanks.

We later went to Caernarfon and walked along the Abershore towards the Foryd – which is now a nature reserve, although we didn't walk very far into what is now the reserve – hence we did not go to the hides. But there is quite good birdwatching just from the small road that runs along the shore: Caernarfon is opposite Anglesey so this is the far end of the Menai Straits with a number of sandbanks off the shore. There were large flocks of curlew, oyster catchers (nervous as usual), a couple of shelduck, brent geese, a small number of wigeon and redshank. I didn't notice any turnstones although there are often small flocks along this shore. It was a fairly grey and pretty windy and cold day. On bright days there is a good view of Snowdonia and Snowdon itself can be seen from this small road, but not on Saturday.

We later visited the RSPB reserve at Conwy although had rather little time as by then it was nearly 4 pm. It looked like a very good place to go back to – but annoyingly can only easily be accessed from the A55 – even though it is within walking distance of Conwy. We saw a couple of goldeneye ducks – other than that there were coots, lapwings and wigeon.

Walk round Conwy mountain
There is a lovely walk out of Conwy (around 6 miles) which goes up Conwy mountain and then returns by crossing the Sychnant pass and coming through a nature reserve and past a small upland lake then farmland and back through the town gate into Conwy. It was a beautiful day (St David's Day) and as usual around Conwy we saw a number of buzzards and ravens. We heard stonechats but did not see them – but did spend a long time watching a kestrel perched not very far away on a rock. The walk goes up to the ironage fort on Conwy montain (though we did not go that far today) and has wonderful views of both the estuary and the castle.

Toads and frogspawn-now on time

We met the chap in the photo at the top (can't see to get blogger to put the photo where I want it...) on our way back over the fields coming into Conwy. And I wondered whether there would be frogspawn in the garden pond on our return - but stupidly forgot to look until this morning when I was walking to the greenhouse to open the windows (yes it is early March but the lettuce and salad seedlings are coming up and so the greenhouse needs some air). And indeed we now have frogspawn. I have kept an eye on when the frogs spawn each year, and after the very cold weather in February they seem to have gone back to the beginning of March, although it doesn't vary enormously. Last year, however they spawned early after a mild period in Februar which was then followed by very cold icy weather and the pond froze and the spawn died. Apparently frogs only lay spawn once - so if this happens it is a BAD thing for frogs who are already in quite a lot of trouble :-(