Watching Spring

My local town is on national TV for a couple of reasons right now, we'll ignore the horrible reason. The local community is trying to move on, and we really need a good tourist season this year. Instead I'll focus on the good reason, which will hopefully help with the tourists!

The BBC have filmed their Springwatch series just down the road from me for the past couple of years. It still feels very odd to see the hills and rivers I know very well on live national TV. Just a reminder of how lucky I am to live in such a beatiful place.

I sat on my deck this morning eating breakfast, reading a book and listening to the sounds of nature all around me. Of course the peace was spoiled slightly by the local farmer rounding up his sheep. Round here they seem to have a wild west approach to sheep herding. Most of it is done on motorbikes and quad bikes and accompanied with loud whooping that echoes round the whole valley!

We've also had our very own nest to watch. A blackbird had built a nest in the store we use for boxes of kindling. 

Look carefully, you can see how we only spotted her a few days ago. 

This was taken 2 days ago, and yesterday afternoon we spotted she wasn't on the nest, after a bit of careful investigating we worked out there were no eggs or chicks in it. Either there were chicks and they've fledged, or the hatched chicks have been eaten, or the eggs have been stolen. We don't know which because we'd never seen inside the nest before yesterday. 

When we got the box out the nest was so beautifully perfect. 

You can just see a few bits of blue egg shell in the nest at the bottom. 

When you lifted the nest out ofthe box some of the sticks came with it as they'd been glued on with mud, and I love how it has straight sides from the corner of the box!



And that wasn't the last of the bird encounters. The weather today is warm and sunny so I've got the doors open. I went out to open up the greenhouse and polytunnel and came back in to hear flapping and banging. This swallow had flown in through the open door and was confused about why it couldn't fly out through the big glass window. 

After a quick photo it's now back to catching insects.