Southwold Again

Tags

pheasant, pier, seashore, Southwold, Suffolk, walking, waves, white pheasant

Last November, Alice had two weeks holiday after leaving her old job and before starting her new one and came to see us for five days.  We loved having her with us for so long.  She spent those few days sorting out some of her belongings as well as visiting an old friend and cycling to Rumburgh to look round the village where we used to live.  We took her out for a meal one evening and on the one bright and dry day of the week we had lunch in Southwold and walked along the front.

Seagulls perched on the top of the breakwater.

The tide was in and the wind was very strong and cold.

A recent storm had caused this set of steps to be covered in sand and stones.

Even as the tide receded, the waves were still very large and powerful.

Southwold Pier

There was spume all over the beach.

Another view of the pier.

Richard, Alice and Elinor sitting on the steps by the café.

We didn’t sit for too long as it really was extremely cold in the wind.  We turned and made our way back to the car and instead of walking back along the front we crossed the road and walked through the town.

A last view of the sea.

I will end this post by including a rather blurry photograph of a bird seen from our spare room window.

A pure white pheasant.

I last saw this bird just after Christmas.  Friends of ours had two white pheasants visiting their garden.  I am surprised the birds lasted as long as they did as they don’t exactly blend in with their surroundings, do they?

This and That – Part 1

Tags

amelanchier, blackbird, blackthorn, bluebell, countryside, cowslip, daffodils, English Elm, English Oak, garden, Goat Willow, green woodpecker, greengage, horse chestnut, Lords and Ladies, Marxh-marigold, pheasant, photography, rainbow, Red Deer, shrubs, Snowy Mespil, Suffolk, trees, white dead-nettle, wild cherry, wild flowers

I have taken a number of photographs over the last few weeks but haven’t had the time to write any posts.   Here are a few of the better pictures from April and earlier.

Red Deer (Cervus elaphus)

Back in January I was driving home from shopping when I saw this small group of five Red Deer making their way across a field towards the road.  I had to slow down and then stop because I could see that they were not only made nervous by my car but their usual path was blocked by a fire someone had lit to get rid of brushwood.  They eventually managed to cross the lane a little further along and then carried on their way.  I took a photo of them through the car window and this is the result – heavily cropped.  I had thought that I had missed them and it was only when I eventually looked carefully at the shot on my computer a few weeks ago I realised that they were there!

The Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) family wandering through the garden at the beginning of April.

This is such an untidy photo with the recycling bin out by the roadside and my former car in the way too.  This is another photo taken through glass (the kitchen window this time – you can see a reflection in the bottom left corner of the picture).  We haven’t seen the pheasants for a while now so I presume the females are busy on their nests.

We had a storm with heavy rain and then the sun came out.  It all looked so bright and fresh, so I stood at the front door and took three photos, to the left, straight ahead and to the right.

A few days later I stood at the end of the drive and took this photo of the ditch that runs along the edge of the garden. We have daffodils growing all along its length. The lane runs parallel with the front of our property. You can also see my new car in this picture.

Pussy Willow / Goat Willow (Salix caprea)

Goat Willow in flower

Cowslips (Primula veris)

A stormy sky. A photo of our house (and the house next door) taken standing next to our big pond and looking across the corner of the field.

The summerhouse

A Green Woodpecker (Picus viridis) looking for ants in the lawn

I was quite pleased with this photo as it showed all the different colours of its feathers, even the black and white spotted feathers under the wings.  This is a female adult as the moustachial feathers are all black.  The male has a crimson centre to the stripe.

A male Blackbird (Turdus merula) was also on the lawn looking for food.

White Dead-nettle (Lamium album)

Wild Cherry blossom (Prunus avium)

The first Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) flower in our garden this spring

There is nothing quite like the scent of Bluebells.  They are wild hyacinths but don’t have the cloying scent of the garden variety.  There is a sweet freshness that lifts the spirits and is irrevocably linked, to my mind, with birdsong, sunshine after rain and hope.

Greengage blossom (Prunus domestica ssp. italica). I hope we have some fruit this year.

Some of the Cowslips in our garden are orange and red.

Pendunculate / English Oak (Quercus robur). New leaves and flowers (catkins) appear at the same time.

Marsh-marigold (Caltha palustris). I found it impossible to photograph this bright yellow flower well.

More Marsh-marigold

New Horse-chestnut leaves and flower buds (Aesculus hippocastanum)

Beautiful new English Elm leaves (Ulmus procera). We have a number of small Elm trees in our garden. Sadly they will only live for a few years before they succumb to Dutch Elm disease.

Lords and Ladies / Jack-in-the-pulpit / Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum).  This plant has many names.   Its arrowhead-shaped leaves are often dark spotted.

Snowy Mespil (Amelanchier canadensis) blossom

Blackthorn blossom (Prunus spinosa). This poor photo is the only image of this year’s blossom I managed to get.

A rainbow behind the trees

All these photos were taken in April and in my garden, except the first one.

I find I haven’t made a music selection for a while so this post’s choice is ‘Let’s Work Together’ by Canned Heat.  Excellent lyrics, great tune and the best tempo ever!

Thanks for visiting!

More Birds!

Tags

birds, black-headed gull, buzzard, dunnock, green woodpecker, kingfisher, pheasant, stock dove, Suffolk, Swallow

This is a Dunnock. They used to be called Hedge Sparrows but they are not like sparrows at all except for their brown and grey colouring. They have quite a bright jangling song and search for food mainly on the ground under hedges and shrubs.

This post will be of more photos of birds I saw this summer and autumn in my garden.  We are very lucky to have so many types of bird visiting.

The dunnock realised I was looking at it and so looked at me.

It then tried to edge behind the hawthorn leaf to hide.

A Green Woodpecker also known as a Yaffle because of its laughing call. This bird is a juvenile as it hasn’t got its full green plumage yet. I hardly ever see these birds in trees. They love ants and ants’ eggs I am pleased to say, and are very welcome in our garden which is ‘ant city’.

They are such attractive birds with their black masks and cherry-red, olive-green, grey-green and primrose-yellow plumage.

I have re-posted this photo of a female pheasant to show how drab they are compared with the males. Their feathers are so good at blending in with grasses  which is very useful at nesting-time.

A Stock Dove

A Swallow – one of our summer visitors. I miss them very much when they fly south for the winter. They left very early this year because we had such a cool August.

Swallow

Another re-post of Black-headed Seagulls in the field behind our house. These were losing their summer plumage. During the winter they don’t have a black head only a black spot on the side of the head. And it isn’t black but dark brown!

A Buzzard flying over our house. Buzzards have returned to East Anglia in the last few years having been absent for a very long time.

I must apologise for the quality of the next photograph.  I am including it because I am so pleased and excited to have seen this bird at all, let alone seeing it in my garden.  It decided to perch in a very shaded part of the garden by the pond and I couldn’t focus on it at all.

The orange and blue bird with white throat and neck patch is a Kingfisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some More Visitors to my Garden : Birds

Tags

birds, blackbird, chaffinch, coal tit, Garden birds, Great Tit, greater spotted woodpecker, greenfinch, house sparrow, moorhen, Muscovy duck, pheasant, pied wagtail, Robin, rook, Suffolk, wren

During this summer and early autumn I managed to photograph a number of animals, birds, insects and other creatures in my garden.  Some of these photos are of very poor quality but I will include them as a record of what I saw.  This post will be of the birds I’ve seen in my garden.

This Great Tit has an insect in its beak and was fluttering its wings very quickly (hence the blurring). It was waiting for me to go away so that it could feed its chicks in a nest box we have in the garden.

I quickly took another photograph and then walked away

Here is one of the pair of Great Tits using that same nest box nearly two weeks later. I am fascinated to see how carefully they hold the insects in their beaks so as not to crush them.

This is a Greenfinch. There are always plenty of these in the garden. The feeder pole is always leaning and covered in mud because of the squirrels and rooks that use the feeder too.

I didn’t quite get all of this cock Pheasant’s tail.

Cock Pheasant

Cock Pheasant

A female Blackbird collecting insects for her chicks.

Another female Blackbird searching for food.

And again.

My daughter came running to me one day saying that there was a strange bird in our garden.  She described it as being half duck, half chicken.  I had to have a look and discovered that one of our neighbour’s Muscovy Ducks was visiting us.  If you have ever seen a Muscovy Duck walking you will know that they move their head and neck back and forth while walking just like a chicken does.

Female Muscovy Duck

Walking like a chicken

I thought I would post this photo of a Wren again as I was quite pleased to get it.  Wrens are quite shy birds and fairly small (3.75″) but have very loud voices.

Wren

I’ve posted this photo of a Robin before too

Female Greater Spotted Woodpecker

Male Chaffinch

Pied Wagtail

Rook

Rook.

Coal Tit. These birds are very slightly smaller than Blue Tits at about 4.5″. You can see the mud on the feeder that the Rooks put there with their dirty feet and beaks!

Male House Sparrow

The usual rear view of a Moorhen as it runs off down the garden

A male Blackbird at dusk

 

 

 

A Hotch Potch.

Tags

Allium, Alpine Pasque Flower, Ant hill, aquilegia, Balm of Gilead, Bee, blackberry, Bramley Apple blossom, Cacti, Cedar of Lebanon, chaffinch, Christmas Cactus, Clematis, Common Sedge, Common Vetch, Cotoneaster, Damson, GERANIUM, Goat Willow seeds, Great Tit, hare, Hawthorn, Holly, House Spider, Japanese Maple, Jay, Knautica, moon, Muntjac, pheasant, Shrub rose Canary Bird, Spindle, stock dove, sunset, thrift, Thyme-leaved Speedwell, Tufted Duck, vegetable garden, Viburnum, White-Shouldered House Moth, winter-flowering honeysuckle, Zebra Spider

 

Last evening while I was admiring the pink sunset…..

 

….E was admiring the rising of the moon.  She called to me to come and see it as it was so large and orange.  I joined her at her bedroom window and we watched it slowly slide up the sky behind the trees.  I went into my room hoping to see it more clearly from there and saw below me on the drive, the hare again!  Typically, I had the wrong camera with me, it was too dark and the hare wouldn’t stay and be photographed.

This is the only photo I managed to get.

I went outside into the twilight with little bats flying about the garden and crossed the road and looked at the moon through the hedge.  It wasn’t orange any more but it was still beautiful.

The visit from the hare and the rising moon reminded me that hares are supposed to be magical and people today still take care not to hurt a hare.  One of Mum’s neighbours was new to the area a few years ago and asked another neighbour how he could get rid of the rabbits and hares which were damaging the trees and plants in his garden.  He was told that the rabbits could be shot but ‘we don’t shoot hares in Suffolk’.  In Anglo Saxon mythology, Ostara the goddess of the moon, fertility and Spring was often depicted with hare’s ears or a hare’s head.  Eostre (where we get the word Easter from) was the Celtic version of Ostara and was the goddess associated with the moon, death, redemption and resurrection during the turning of Winter into Spring.  Eostre was a shape-shifter too and took the shape of a hare at each full moon.  Well, well, well!  (I looked all that up using Google!).

Yesterday was a busy one with my usual shopping with Mum and then going to Halesworth to hand in my prescription at the surgery and post a couple of letters.  I got home just after 2.00pm and had some lunch.  The afternoon was spent dusting, vacuuming and doing more mending.  R got home just as I was finishing.  He had had a fraught day at work so after we had had our cup of tea he went into the garden and planted out his peas and beans.  A soothing task which took him over an hour and was all done except the watering-in by the time I had cooked the evening meal.

This morning I went out to admire his handiwork.

Putting the anti-rabbit/deer/hare/pigeon etc barriers up had taken most of the time yesterday.  We hope they work!  You can see the potatoes coming up in the bed behind the peas and beans.  While I was down at the vegetable patch I had a look at the pond and saw a strange looking duck.  I tried taking its photo with my small camera but wasn’t able to get a clear picture.  I fetched our newer, better camera and tried again.

 

 

I think this is a female tufted duck who visited to sample the fish in our pond.  I had to crop the photos as I still couldn’t get near enough to the duck.  The pond, as you see, is covered in the fluffy seeds of Goat Willow.  The seeds aren’t only on the pond but are everywhere, floating in the air, covering the grass, coming into the house.

This is a spider’s web I noticed yesterday on the outside of one of our windows.  It is covered with fluffy willow seeds.  Despite my brushing the web away very often the spider insists on making its web just there all the time.

The rest of this post will be a strange selection of photos that I took today and some others that I haven’t been able to put in any of my recent posts.

This is a late entry in the apple blossom awards.  We thought the Bramley Apple wasn’t going to flower this year, but we were wrong!

The Cedar of Lebanon has new leaves growing that look like old-fashioned shaving brushes.

All the hollies have new leaves too.

The Japanese Maple has the most beautiful cherry-red seeds.

It has beautiful leaves too that glow in the sunshine.

I got home yesterday and saw a Jay in the garden.  I had great difficulty taking these photos from inside the car.

This is one of my Christmas Cacti and it is flowering again for the third time in six months.  It first flowered in November, then in February and now in May.  I think it is very confused!

R’s cacti are all coming in to flower too.

Mammalaria

Mammalaria flower

 

 

Peanut cactus flower.

I don’t know what this one is called.

The little white Alliums in the garden are very popular with the bees.  They are under the laburnum trees which are also full of bees and the noise they make is astounding.  I think they sound like cars in a grand prix race – the pitch is almost exactly the same – it’s like listening to a race about a mile away.

The new shoots on the Viburnum Bodnantense are crimson.

Tiny damsons.

Willow seeds.

Bee on the cotoneaster horizontalis.

Geranium Phaeum in R’s flowerbed.

Flowers on the Spindle tree.

The Hawthorn hedge at the bottom of the garden near the old summerhouse.

A White-shouldered House Moth

R took these photos of a muntjac deer.

A chaffinch

One of my herbs – cedronella canariensis (Balm of Gilead).

Alpine Pasque Flower

A Great Tit

A Stock Dove.

A female Pheasant.

A Zebra Spider.  These spiders are only about 4mm long.  They are jumping spiders and can leap a distance of about 4cm.

A baby House Spider.

The tiny flowers of Thyme-Leaved Speedwell.

Aquilegia flower

Thrift flower

The wonderfully scented Clematis Montana ‘Rubens’

Shrub rose ‘Canary Bird’

Blackberry flowers

Knautica Macedonica

Aquilegia flower

Reflections in the pond

Common sedge

Common Vetch

An ant hill

 

 

Male Holly flower buds.  We don’t have any female holly bushes so no berries!

Heart-shaped berries of the Winter-flowering Honeysuckle

These lovely berries don’t last long as the blackbirds find them irresistible.

 

 

 

Better Late Than Never

Tags

aubretia, birch catkins, bluetit, Bungay, daffodils, Eye, Lent course, narcissus, pheasant, raw milk, roadworks, women drivers, woodpigeon

I don’t seem to have had the time to write a post for days and have got all behind.  So, instead of trying to catch up I will start with today and if I have the time will add in some of the things I have done/noticed during the past week at a later date.

This morning was mainly taken up with housework – boring but necessary.  The weather here, unlike the rest of the country it seems, was lovely.  Bright, hazy sunshine and light winds which dried my washing very nicely.  The wind was a little chilly as it came from the east but nothing to complain about.  I had to go to Bungay in the early afternoon to do some shopping and post a couple of letters.  The improvements to the town’s pavements and road system are coming along nicely and I was able to drive into the centre for the first time in weeks.  When the work is finished there will be fewer traffic jams (I hope!) and the absence of kerbs will mean that those with prams and pushchairs or in wheelchairs or mobility scooters will be able to get about more easily.  The town will look very different and in some ways that is a little sad.  Bungay will have lost it’s timeless look; it will no longer look quaint and old-fashioned but like all other towns with the regulation one-way streets and easy-access shops.

On my way home I nearly collided with another car.  All the lanes are mainly single track with a few passing places.  The lanes are also windy so it is always best not to go too fast.  The driver of the other car came shooting round a corner towards me and had to swerve to avoid me.  She was on the phone.  I am very sorry to say that a lot of the really bad driving I see these days is done by women.  Women used to be reliable, sensible drivers but not any more it seems.  The worst ones are the young girls who appear to be unable to drive at less than 50mph.  They are also the ones using phones:  twice in recent weeks I have been stuck in a queue at a junction behind young women who thought it would be a good moment to sent a text or instant message.  One girl had stopped a couple of yards from the junction to message someone and had opened the driver’s door and was hanging her leg out!  She may have broken down but it didn’t look like it.  Many women don’t know how to reverse and won’t pull into a passing place and to be followed by a woman on the school run in the morning is a terrifying experience!  They are always late and have cars full of children.

My route home was along the road from Bungay to Flixton which has water-meadows on one side of it.  It has been pleasing to see the cows out on the meadows again after their winter stay in the cattle sheds.  The farmer here is one of the few remaining dairy farmers around.  He has recently started selling raw (unpasteurized/unhomogenized) milk from a little stall in the farmyard and this has been exceedingly popular.  Every time I drive past there is always someone there in the little shop.

I took a few photos this afternoon.  This first one (which I actually took this morning) is from an upstairs window and is of a couple of woodpigeons feasting on leaf and flower buds on the top of our hedge.  What is not obvious is that they weren’t the only pigeons on the hedge at that moment and they spent most of the day there too!

 

Birch catkins and new leaves.  Our horrible, tumbledown summerhouse is in the background!

 

A bluetit in the birch tree.

 

Scented narcissus

 

Aubretia

 

Scented daffodils.  These have come out extremely early and have rather thick petals, almost as if fashioned out of wax.

 

A male pheasant.  I took this photo through the kitchen window which accounts for the vague haziness.

 

I drove to Mum’s house this evening at 6.45pm and there was still a lot of light in the sky.  We attended her Lent course lecture in Eye, the subject being Prayer for Healing and Wholeness and given by the Sub-Dean and Canon Pastor from the cathedral at Bury St Edmunds.  A very interesting talk indeed.

A starry drive home with the temperature just above freezing at 1 degree centigrade.