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.