Blue heaven

This is meant to be a garden blog, but what's the point of rules if you can't break them? I've been out bluebell hunting today and at the recommendation of a friend headed for Castle Wood at Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire.

And she was right, it's brilliant, even though there wasn't much in the way of sunshine today to light up the show. It's a marvellous bit of ancient woodland and the bluebells are at their very best in an area where there are lots of mature beech trees (sadly I'm not enough of a photographer to capture the best of it).
Definitely worth a visit. The castle's good too.

Hedge fun

There seem to be plenty of new beech leaves elsewhere, but the buds are only just beginning to burst on the section of hedge by our front door. It's a bit of the garden that is shadowed by the house next door, so I suppose it's a little colder there.

Lower down the hedge has a leaf or two, but higher up lots of the buds are just beginning to unfurl. The new leaves have a delicacy that my camera just doesn't seem to quite get, but trying to capture the moment makes you look that bit closer at the subject.
The hawthorn and sycamore have been in leaf for a week or more, ash buds are just opening now too. I was particularly struck by the colour of the new sycamore leaves; in sunlight they look almost like polished bronze.   

No show

No sign of swifts here yet. Everything seems a little later this spring, but I can't see how a chilly pre-spring here in Wales can have much influence on departure time for birds that are coming all the way from Africa. 
When they do get here 'our' swifts are going to be faced with a bit of a housing issue because their nest site over our bathroom window seems to have been taken by a pair of house sparrows. It will be interesting to see how that one pans out.

Co-ordinated colour

I'd say spring has arrived here at last - and it's yellow. Everything has been delayed this year, but it all seems to be coming together just now.
The grass on the lawn is only just beginning to show much growth, but the chilly weather hasn't held back the dandelions. In yesterday's sunshine the new dandelions seemed to blaze their brightness back at the sun.
And along the hedge there's more yellow too - lesser celandine covers the ground. Overnight the weather has changed and this afternoon is wet and gloomy, so all those bright, little celandine stars have re-closed.
Wordsworth wrote about lesser celandine shrinking from cold and rain but at 'the first moment that the sun may shine, bright as the sun himself, tis out again'. Taking time to enjoy the sun yesterday I was able to keep an eye out for returning swallows; I saw one briefly on Thursday, but yesterday there were half a dozen over the valley.
And when I checked with a torch last night 'my' swallows were back roosting on a beam in the garage roof on either side of last summer's nest. All that way and they make a beeline to my garage, marvellous.

Welcome back

Overnight we've had rain after about a fortnight of dry weather. The mini-drought has been holding back grass growth and in places the hillsides are turning brown.
Strange days. But this morning the ground is wet because there's finally been some rain in the night and, if the BBC weatherman is right, there's more on the way.
It feels as though spring has been on hold. Things are changing though, I've just been in the garden and heard my first chiffchaff of the year.
Looking back at last spring's posts, 2012's first chiffchaff was in mid-March. Are they arriving a fortnight later this year, or is it just that I've been not been in the garden so much because it has been cold.
Today's chiffchaff was in the same spot as last year's - some mature trees behind the houses across the road from us. But it didn't seem up to performing its full song, just the warm up notes before the main event; maybe it takes a while to get over the journey.

Bee un-happy

When the time came to step up and do the decent thing our Government chose not to follow the evidence and protect bees. Disappointing, but then you don't expect much in the way of common sense from the Palace of Westminster, do you? 
But it's nice to see that a Select Committee can look at a problem and see it for what it is. The Environmental Audit Committee has been looking at the impact of pesticide use on bees and other pollinating insects (read its report here) and says: “Defra seems to be taking an extraordinarily complacent approach  to protecting bees given the vital free service that pollinators provide to our economy."
Just as it took an extraordinarily complacent approach to the threat of imported tree diseases. After doing nothing for years it now has the huge problem of ash dieback to deal with.
The committee, with members from all parties, says a "growing body of peer-reviewed research" suggests that the use of one group of insecticides, neonicotinoids,  is having an especially damaging impact on pollinators. Neonicotinoids are put on crops like oilseed rape, maize and sugar beet as well as being sold for garden use, so there's a lot of the stuff around.
The MPs want an immediate moratorium on use of neonicotinoids until the science can show for sure whether they are harmful or not, which seems sensible. The committee's chairman says "there is no justification for people continuing to use these products on their Dahlias when they could be having a detrimental effect on pollinator populations".

Flight path 2

Well into March and our wood-burning stove is still eating fuel like it's going out of fashion. So, my day starts with a trip down to the shed to get more wood in.
And today, I'm glad it does. As I'm coming out of the shed my ears turn in to a out-of-place bird call.
I'm pretty sure I know that harsh, rasping sound as soon as I hear it; a peregrine. That's my first thought, but then the second dismisses it - you don't see peregrine falcons in your back garden, do you?

That said, they do nest on the Pembrokeshire coast, which is 15 miles away. What I saw as I turned was a dozen wood pigeons flying along the valley in a flock that was spreading like buckshot.

John James Audubon

Then that rat-ta-tat cry again and there was the falcon, wings a blur, just behind the last of the pigeons. On the flat it didn't have a chance of over-taking even the slowest of the target group and, as they disappeared from view, it seemed to have given up on the chase.
Presumably, the pigeons had managed to dodge the original dive-bomb ambush. Peregrines have been clocked doing over 200mph in a stooping dive, but that's all about gravity. On the flat, when its just about wing beats, the falcon is no more than an outside bet against a pigeon.
It has made my day, and decided me on the bird list rule question. The peregrine goes on the list; only counting birds that land in your garden is probably the way to go for a purist, but it misses out the fun stuff.