Wet winter

Finally a break in all the rain. This December has been wetter than any I can remember, but today we've had a few hours of blue sky.
Over the last ten days the Cych has come over its banks three or four times, but so far the floodwater has mostly found its way back to the river. Taking a walk along the river this morning it was striking to see how much has been changed by the force of the water; tree boughs ripped clean off, log dams shifted and sections of bank eaten away.

It was good to see the sun, if only for an hour or two, and to see what has to be the first sign that spring's on the way. In places the soil has been scoured away by the floodwater to reveal clumps of snowdrop bulbs, each with a spike of green.
Back home I've been bringing in more wood for the fire, which is now a more time-consuming chore because each bit has to be checked for uninvited guests. On Christmas Day I brought a basketful of wood in and soon after we were chasing a wasp around the kitchen.
Drowsy at first, it was soon fully awake and ready for a fight. After a chase from room to room I caught it with a glass and took it out to the wood shed.
A second wasp turned up an hour or so later, but by then I was too busy with turkey and roast potatoes to go hunting. It turned up dead in the sink when the time came for washing up.
Now each log is getting the once over. I think it's better for both us and them that their sleep remains undisturbed.

All quiet

For the first time in weeks it was quiet when I went out to the dustbin this morning. Nothing happening on the far side of the hedge, so presumably every scrap of apple has now been eaten.
Over the hedge opposite our back door there's an apple tree in our neighbour's garden and this year she left the crop untouched. At first blackbirds came to eat the fruit while it was still in the banches, but as time has gone on it has dropped to the ground and they've been spending all day, every day, feasting at ground level.
I've enjoyed hearing the sounds of them clucking to one another and rustling about in amongst the fallen leaves has been. Though it's been frustrating not to be able to see the party - the hedge is dense, dark Leylandii.

Photo: Adam Kumiszcza

Then last week the change in the weather brought fieldfares to us for the first time and they joined the action. For the last few days the rustling and clucking stepped up a gear, but now all's quiet; have they eaten the lot? 
Off on a bit of a tangent, I have to say that the latest State of the UK's Birds report makes depressing reading. It makes me feel ancient that species that were common-all-garden when I first started birdwatching as a child are now under threat.
The RSPB's Dr Mark Eaton says of the report "many of the birds we're referring to aren't rare and don't occur in remote locations... they are ones you used to see while walking the dog or enjoying a family picnic". We're all the poorer for allowing the change to go unchecked.







 
   

Leaf watch

At last we've had a proper autumn day here. The tree colours have been pretty good for a week or so, but because of the rain the fallen leaves on the ground have been quickly turning to mush.
Dry leaves to scuff your feet through is part of the autumn experience, isn't it? But over the last few days the leaves have been drying out nicely and the scuff factor is finally on the up.

Field maple

Back working on the hedges this afternoon I've been up a ladder again and that's given me the chance to do a bit of a leaf fall audit. The ash leaves are mostly gone already, stripped off the branches by the wind before their green had faded to yellow.
Across the valley the oaks still have their leaves in place and but they're now a rusty, red-brown. My hedges are mostly blackthorn and its leaves are now a striking, sun-catching lemon yellow that's almost as bright as the few field maples I put into the gaps a winter or two ago.

Another level

Ever get the feeling you're being watched? At last some decent weather here and this morning I've been up a ladder working on the hedge between us and the road.
Quite a long way up a ladder. Because we're on a hillside it takes the the ladder legs at full extension to get to grips with the top of the hedge and the legs have to be standing on a raised hedge bank.
So, I'm almost at jackdaw level; looking back towards the house I'm about where the gutter is. And as I've been working away with saw and secateurs I've been able to watch jackdaws coming and going.
They're are always around, or seem to be - on our chimney, our nextdoor neighbour's chimney or on the chimneys of one of the houses across the road.

This year they started to build a nest in our chimney, but I spotted one of the birds coming and going with sticks and got the chimney sweep in to put a new mesh cover on the chimney pot. When the chimney was swept enough sticks came out to fill a carrier bag.
There seems to be a lot going on in the jackdaw community just now. They're spending a lot of time on and around the chimneys that were used as nesting sites this year and 'speaking' to one another all the while.
One of these 'conversations' got very heated this morning and the two birds ended up fighting. Locked together in a pecking match the combatants fell together off the chimney and slid down the roof slates, still fighting.
It was only when they reached the gutter that they broke off from the fight. One of the two flew away, while the other sat for a moment looking a little shaken up.
Breeding pairs are the bedrock of jackdaw society. They pair up and, if all goes well, stay paired for life. This year's  youngsters should be establishing these pair bonds around now, which is probably what all the jackdaw chat in our street is about today.
 

Break for lunch

I've only myself to blame. I was given nine months to write the book I'm working on at the moment and should have paced things better.
I didn't, so it has become something of a scramble. It will get done, but only just (hope my publisher doesn't stumble on this blog...) What I hadn't been expecting was just how good the summer was going to be, and when the weather is as good as it was in July and early August the last thing you want to do is be in front of a computer, is it?
As a result things have been left undone. The garden has become very unkempt, the window frames didn't get painted and this blog has been left fallow.
But anyway, it was an incredible summer. I've dropped in here on my way to the kitchen to cook the corn cob I've just picked for my lunch. Yes, summer 2013 has taught me that I can grow sweetcorn in north Pembrokeshire.
All the effort I've put in over the last few years, has been wasted. And this year seed rotted in the chilly ground, but the plants I started under glass did keep going through a less-than-promising spring.
And they've loved the heat, which means I've a nice little crop of corn to enjoy this autumn. Off to lunch - and, promise to self, more posts.  

Eagle, or birdie?

Photo: RSPB/Jim Nesbit

I love this picture. It came to me today on a emailed press release from the RSPB and made me smile. The golf bag had been left unused in a garage, which had offered the robins the opportunity to move in.
They were left in peace and have raised five young apparently. Of course, press realeases usually have a message and this one was 'selling' the RSPB's 'Giving Nature a Home' campaign.
It has the target of signing up a million people to making wildlife-friendly improvements to their garden, like adding birdboxes, building log piles and giving the lawn mower a rest. I've signed up to convert my front lawn to a wildflower meadow.

Returns policy

Photo: vogelart.info

It feels a little like our summer has been and gone here in Pembrokeshire. This week has been grey and dull. So, it’s a little depressing to know that summer’s birds are already beginning to head south.
The BTO’s cuckoo tracking project is reporting on the progress of their radio tagged birds and apparently some have already crossed to Europe. The first to go was a bird they have called Sussex, which left England for France last week.

Since then more have gone and as of yesterday five of the 13 cuckoos had left the UK. They’ve gone to Belgium, France and Germany, while Sussex is now 100 miles or so from Rome. You can follow their progress on the BTO website here.

Nest update

All of a sudden our garage swallows are out and about. Today they've spent hours coming and going, resting when the rains is at its worst and then heading back out over the valley. They seem to have got the hang of flying with no trouble at all and are now concentrating on sharpening up their skills. This afternoon that seems to have involved flying around and around in circles just outside the garage door seemingly just for the fun of it.

Cracking time

Things are happening with our swallow neighbours. When I went into the garage to straighten out the dust sheets under the nest this morning I could see tail feathers sticking out of the nest up in the roof.

Getting the dust sheet in just the right place makes sense. There's hardly anything on it yet, but I know from previous years that the poo build-up will be huge later in the season.
Half an hour later I wondered back into the garage and noticed something new right in the middle of the sheet - a scrap of egg shell. Hatching has started.
The shell is so incredibly thin that it's a wonder that it can bear the weight of the incubating adult. As I studied it I could hear the small, tinny calls of that first nestling and wondered how many brothers and sister will join it up there in their mud nest as time goes on.
However many in the brood, it means that the swallow pair now have their work cut out. No more time for sitting around in that cherry tree. 

High note

I'm not sure if our cherry tree is "our" cherry tree. It's part of the hedge between our garden and next-door neighbour's garden and pre-dates us both.

Over the last couple of years it has begun to look a bit sickly with fewer leaves than it once had and not much in the way of blossom (or cherries). Maybe our cherry is on its last legs.

But the bare branches do seem to suit our resident swallows. Since they've arrived back the upper branches have been the song-post of choice. At the moment the female is sitting on eggs in the roof of our garage, but her mate hasn't been wasting his time - he's busy spending the evenings twittering away high up in the cherry.

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.

Flight path

Ice on the pond this morning and flakes of snow on the wind. On the trip to fill the birdfeeders I decided it was a mistake not to put on a coat - or gloves.
High up, heading west, a couple of ravens. As they flew one peeled off to one side and then looped over its partner before returning to their businesslike, as-the-crow-flies course.
On completion of the manoeuvre one of the two "said" something to the other. To my non-raven way of thinking it could have been a "look at me", or perhaps it was "can you stop showing off..." 
And how to describe the call? Not the usual raven croak, but something a step or two up the scale and somehow frog-like and rubbery.
I came back in and looked at the bird list on this blog, which is now quite close to having run its year-long span. I've seen ravens from the garden before, but have never remembered to put them on my list.
I wonder what else I've left out? Anyway, should I add these ravens? Can anybody help with a definitive garden bird list rule?
Should a bird that over-flies your garden be on its bird list? What about birds seen in the distance that don't fly over - or even a remarkable over-the-garden wall twitch?

Flight time

Spring is on the way, or at least cuckoos are. The weather forecast here in Pembrokeshire is promising us a return to winter, but down in west Africa the BTO's radio-tagged cuckoos are beginning to head north once again.  

Good neighbours?

It's probably a little too late in the year to be giving nestboxes their MOT, but yesterday I noticed that my sparrow 'terrace' box was looking the worse for wear. It's old and the roof had a crack in it that has to be letting the rain in.
So, out came the ladder and down came the box. Getting the roof off wasn't easy as the screws were badly rusted and when I took it off I wasn't sure what I was going to find inside; I knew it had been used last summer, but didn't now whether chicks were raised successfully.
But it turned out to have two nests inside - one a neat, little sparrow nest and another, a wasps' nest the size of a grapefruit. Quite a surprise. 
I wonder if the sparrow chicks found that all that buzzing going on next door kept them awake. Or maybe it was soothing and lulled them to sleep.

Snail mail

There's got to be some sort of pun waiting to fight its way out of 'snail mail' and bees, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Writing a letter to your MP seems a quaint way to go about things and emailing it rather than actually putting it into a postbox doesn't make it much less olde worlde, but perhaps every little helps.
The most impressive environmental campaign of the moment has to be the fight to put a stop the use of a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. The evidence seems to suggest that they're very bad news for bees, or at least that they may be bad for bees.
Very soon Europe may decide to suspend the suspect substances, but how will the UK vote on the issue? The charity Buglife is worried that our Government will block the measure and is calling for those of us who care about bees, pollination and a healthy environment to apply a little pressure by writing to MPs.
Can't do any harm. Read Buglife's point of view in a guest post at Mark Avery's blog and then visit the Buglife site for some ideas about what to write.
 

Mud lark

At last this weekend, a real sense of the seasons on the move. We have lamb's tails in the hedge, the wren is singing away down by the compost heap and there's flowers on the lesser celandine.
There's so much that needs doing in the garden, but I decided to spend some of the day on my little walking project - a Ceredigion guidebook. I've 40 walks to do by November and I'm itching to get stuck into it.
So, I headed off to do a circuit in the Teifi valley. But a mile in and the mud got the better of me - it was terrible.
It's wetter this year than ever. A couple of days without rain is OK, but I think I need at least a fortnight.

Family time

We've not had much snow here, but the cold spell has brought lots more birds into the garden. First pickings each morning are going to the gang of crows that wait for me to fill up the feeders.
We always have lots of jackdaws around and this morning I counted 16 at the feeders, on the bird table or waiting for a turn to eat. Over the last week or so they have been joined by a few magpies, two or three rooks and, today, a single jay.
The rooks find the hanging seed-feeders a bit tricky, but seem to have got the hang of the cage that holds fat balls. One bird gets hold of the fat through the mesh and then whacks it against the bars until bits fall to the ground where the others are waiting.
I feel as though I'm on my way to 'collecting' the whole crow family as we also get a carrion crow dropping in from time to time, but I may have to wait a long time to complete the set. Yes, ravens do over-fly the garden from time to time, but I don't expect to add a hooded crow or a chough to my bird list any time soon...  

Bee better

Photo: Bernie

A bit late for a New Year resolution, but better late than never. I've decided that I need to do more to make my garden bee-friendly in 2013 after spending time on the Bee Kind pages at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust's website.
It asks you about what grows in your garden and awards you points per bee-friendly plant. I went into the process feeling a bit smug, expecting to get a good score.
And 2,200 points didn't seem so bad until I got to the page that gives you details of other people's scores where you live. However, it turns out that the average for a garden in Wales is 2,327 while the top score is a hefty 6,114.
So, I'm below average - and must try harder. In my defence I'd say that my garden is more about trees, nettles and long grass (for butterflies and moths, amphibians and small mammals) than it is about flowers, but I can see that there's room for improvement.
As it happens the Bee Kind test does provide a route to enlightenment by coming up with a list of planting suggestions. For me it recommends 10, including Mahonia, Alliums and thyme; time for a trip to the garden centre I think.