Day 4, #30dayswild

On 1 June I was in Yorkshire, and not able to write a post for this blog, but now I'm back there's a chance to catch up. Yorkshire was lovely, especially Nunnington Hall, a National Trust building with a delightful organic garden which nestles in a beautiful riverside setting. An added treat on the visit was the exhibition of 2014 British Wildlife Photography Awards winners (the link will take you to a gallery of the finalists, which is well worth a look, especially the Animal Portrait winner, which went to a photograph from the Farne Islands, and was my own favourite - having found the website I'm going to be looking at them all again!) Serendipity, or what?

Next day we went to Whitby - not much observable wildlife apart from the herring gulls, but a nice example at the Abbey of the effects of nature on sedimentary stone over the years:

We were in no doubt about the efficacy of weathering, the wind was an icy blast on Monday. On my last day, somewhat beset by the weather again, we drove past Rievaulx Abbey but didn't go in - somewhere warm, with coffee, beckoned. There were plant stalls too - pity I was travelling home by train.

Back home and there weren't too many dramatic developments in the garden, again the result of the cold weather, but the may blossom is now fully out, and will shortly be followed by the elder. One of the first things I did was head out to the greenhouse to see what had been happening there. To my horror I found that the nasty sticky yellow whitefly trap, which I put up because my precious scented pelargoniums were suffering, and which I thought was preferable to spraying, had caught two small bumble bees. I am now racked with guilt, and the trap is in the dustbin! The pels will just have to take their chances in future. I've sent off a donation to the Friends of the Earth Bee Cause to assuage my conscience, and will be assiduously assisting any bees I find from now on to make up for it. I was very impressed, visiting my brother and his family at the weekend, to see his bumble bee hive - sadly, my budget won't quite run to such a gesture, but I have got a house for solitary bees to put up this week. I've also sown some catmint for them which will need planting out soon. I think I might manage to make a woodpile too - well, more exactly, I'll collect up the random bits of ash tree which have come down, and put them somewhere in a better, and undisturbed pile. I don't expect the existing inhabitants will mind a minor change of location!

Tomorrow I think I'll take the camera for a walk...

30 days wild

This June the Wildlife Trusts are running a campaign called 30 Days Wild. I decided to join in so that I could spend the month thinking about how to encourage wildlife in the garden. I'm starting by revitalising this blog (four years on!), which had anyway turned into something mostly garden- and nature-focused. It's got a bit of a new look, and a new name, GeraniumCat in the Garden (inspired, huh?).

It won't only be about wildlife - gardening, food and related books are sure to get a look in, local history too, but for June I will try to post at least a picture most days for 30 Days Wild. I may be in Devon for part of the month, too, but that means dogwalking so I'll be out and about.

It seemed a good omen that last night while I was shutting up the chickens and thinking about what I'm going to talk about for 30 days, a tawny owl flew past and there were several brown long-eared bats flitting about. I want to increase the number of plants that are attractive to insects in the garden to encourage both bats and bees. So far, my greatest success is probably in attracting slugs, so I am embracing horticultural fleece with some enthusiasm.

Most importantly, I want to spend some time getting to grips with my new wildflower key. This will be a real challenge, and might be easier if I'm in Devon, because there are so many more wildflowers there than there are in North Northumberland!

NB: GeraniumCat's Bookshelf has also been on hiatus for some time, but I hope to be back there soon.

Bugged by inconsistency

It's official, I'm thoroughly inconsistent. Yesterday I was delighted to find that the hens view earwigs with voracious enthusiasm. Then I came in and spent ten minutes rescuing and trying to photograph a grasshopper. You can see it if you peer closely at the middle of the picture. It's a field grasshopper, chorthippus brunneus, I think.

Time marches on

Two  months since I've been here! Obviously, life is so uneventful that there is simply nothing to say, I'm just swimming serenely along with my feathers only slightly ruffled by a passing breeze - or else, it has been so frantic that I haven't had time to sit and write. And it's the latter, I'm afraid, there's just too much to try to fit into the day - it doesn't matter how hard you try to organise work, noting schedules and deadlines and calculating to be sure that one job will be finishing as another arrives: authors don't work like that, and it all manages to come along at once. Add in a funding emergency, and that's it - the garden is utterly neglected, apart from four courgette plants limping along anaemically. What is wrong with them I can't imagine, except that it was cold and wet when they were planted. True, the strawberries have been tremendous, and the one cucumber was delicious. I don't mind that only two of the hens have been laying properly, because we still have more than enough eggs (who's got time to cook?).

I've been pleased, too, with the dozen pelargoniums I bought as plug plants, which are all growing healthily, and the sweet peas are a pleasure. If I haven't seen many butterflies, I've enjoyed the moths at dusk, and we've had an influx of scarily large beetles (as yet unidentified: I think some kind of ground beetle, and yes, I do know what they are not - not stag beetles or chafers; this is a beetle I haven't met before, and no, I didn't take its photograph...). Earlier in the month we heard quail calling, which was exciting, and the grey partridges creak away in the evenings. For a week or so, a red-legged partridge took to yelling its head off on a fencepost in the paddock. Was it trying to intimidate the hens? Or just out-shriek the competition? One morning I woke about 5 because there was so much noise outside my window - it was five blackbirds on the lawn, all scolding a partridge which was looking singularly unimpressed.

The most pleasure has come from a family of garden warblers who are constantly a-flutter around the house, tiny delicate birds with heavy eye-makeup and personalities out of all proportion to their scale, and the swallows - all day the sky is alive with them and the count of the phone lines is up to at least 50. OH says that when he is mowing they play chicken with the tractor, actually flying underneath it as it makes its steady progress round the paddock. There is certainly plenty for them to eat.

 And the rain it raineth every day (but at least these streptocarpuses are doing quite well...)

Firebird!

Last week I was visiting the APs in Devon and took the opportunity to do a little pottering in the garden - the weather was mostly mild and sunny, and the terrace was busy with deep blue damsel flies, orange tip butterflies, even the occasional small blue. My mother and I amused ourselves by counting bird species actually nesting in the garden - we got to well over 30, a count that includes ravens, jays, sparrowhawks, nuthatches...I've just done a similar count for home, and achieved similar numbers of very different birds (and because our northern garden doesn't include many large trees, the way the Devon one does, I expanded our area to include the fields immediately surrounding us, so the buzzards count here, but not in Devon). As I'm writing this at my desk in the window, a pair of bullfinches - regular visitors attracted by my rather laissez-faire atttitude to dandelions - landed in the ash tree opposite.

The high point of the Devon visit, though, was a sighting unlike any I've experienced before: as I walked across the terrace there was a tremendous kerfuffle as two birds hurtled into a pittosporum bush, shrieking their heads off. A high piercing note, an unmistakable screech of fury, and the minute bird emitting the racket was positively bouncing up and down on his branch. Yet despite his tiny size he was highly visible, because he was raising and flashing his crest, a violent streak of fiery orange that flashed in the sunlight. I watched spellbound for several minutes while he bounced and flashed, until the object of his wrath burst from the depths of the bush and fled across the wooded slope below the terrace. The owner of the spectacular headgear was a goldcrest, one of the enchantingly named kinglet family, and our smallest songbird:

Photo from Wikipedia

How such a tiny bundle of fluff could make such a noise I can't imagine, but the picture above does give some idea of the brilliance of his crest. In the past I've struggled to see these elusive creatures, which are more generally "sighted" by tracking their creaky tseeping cry (what Wikipedia calls "a subdued rambling sub-song" - love it!) to a bush and then peering into the murky interior to see the odd flick of a wing - they like dense bushes like yew, and nest in conifers, which makes them especially hard to see. I believe we may have them around us here in Northumberland, I think I heard them in the woodland a couple of fields away, but the tree cover around our garden is not heavy enough for them to visit us here.

I'm back home enjoying the sparrows - my mother is delighted that they now have a regular pair, and envies us our rambunctious flock of more than thirty. Who would ever have thought that sparrows could be rare?

Easter

A very young Scotch Dumpling, a cooking apple with glorious flowers. The fruit are less appealing to look at, being pale green and knobbly, but I like the pleasant apple froth it creates when cooked.

Easter weekend was uneventful, which was nice, and we had some welcome rain on Saturday evening. Oh yes, and the swallows are back, they arrived on the 20th. Lovely to see them.

Winter visitors

 Fieldfare

Photo taken in Rumia, Poland by Adam Kumiszcza

They're back, the fieldfares, and my heart gave a real leap when I saw them in the ash trees at the top of the garden this morning. They are much later than in some areas of the country, but I've found that to be the case every year. There will be no shortage of berries for them this year.

The old ladies sunning

The Bluebells do like to take advantage of good weather - it was very wet most of the week, so they didn't get out much. Today is warmer, if a bit windy, so they can enjoy it. Here they are - scraggy old dears!

For most of the past two months my dressing table has been home to various bottles which might make you wonder about my toilette regime. Alongside the delicately packaged Calvin Klein 1, Paloma, something with such a pretty box that I can't bring myself to start it, and the usual prophylactics against ageing that we over-50s allow ourselves to be conned into buying (though mine are distinctly closer to the cold cream end of the market than the designer labelled kind - indeed, they would be cold cream if it weren't that I don't much like the smell!)...I digress, alongside these fancy bottles are white containers stating "Total Mite Kill!", "Poultri-Drops", and "Just for Scaly Legs!". It comes of living in a small cottage - when you unwrap a parcel there is nowhere to put anything down, and the last line of resort is always my dressing table - things there are out of the way but easy to find. They should, of course, be on their way to the bin where all such items are kept, but the scaly leg treatment needs to be applied regularly, so it's good to keep it where I notice it from time to time.

I'm happy to report that the Bluebells and I are recovering nicely from our scale problems, but this has been the worst year I've known for pests and unpleasantnesses. We made the mistake, too, of moving the girls into a wooden house - we had to move them from their wheeled Eglu, a wonderful beast known here as the Vardo, because Steerage is rather feeble, and stopped being able to flutter up the ladder. We tried customising the ladder, to no avail, and for several weeks younger son and I took turns at crawling into the run to pick her up and put her into the house each night, but that was less than ideal on several counts: first, she also tended to take a nose dive (beak dive?) or her way out in the morning; second, it was frequently a horrible, muddy task and very difficult in the dark, taking both of us, one to hold the chicken and one to hold the torch; and third, it meant at least one of us had to be here, since OH is, like Pooh Bear, a trifle stout, to put it kindly. The wooden house was a cheap option, but by mid-summer we were fighting mite infestations (and more earwigs than you've ever seen, yeuch!). The roof blew off in a summer gale, too, leaving three rather ruffled and indignant ladies, so a necessary accessory ever since has been a large bag of potting compost on top. I expect you know that if you heave a bag of compost off a chicken house roof and onto the ground, it tends to split?

We got tired of the wooden retirement home (not as tired as itchy hens, I'm sure) and the new retirement home is a handsome latest-style Eglu Go. I think with two Eglus we are probably producing the most expensive eggs in the history of humanity (best not to mention this to OH!), but they taste wonderful (the eggs, that is), and we do love our girls. We do manage to be pragmatic up to a point - one was despatched when she became ill: the vet might have been able to prolong her life at the expense of her comfort, but it seemed much kinder to get her misery over and done with. As long as the girls take pleasure in strolling round the paddock, and stretching their wings out in a dust bath, though, we are happy to clean them out, chat to them and provide quantities of dried mealworms for their delectation. Boy, do chickens love mealworms! How do they know they're so good? Betty runs across the paddock shrieking with excitement when she sees the tub. Yesterday, she flew half its length (possible slight exaggeration, but it was an impressive feat for an old lady).

Off now to check that the buzzard isn't anywhere to be seen - regular readers may remember Betty's nasty experience? Her confidence is entirely restored, but when they are out frequent checks are necessary, and if it's about, the girls have to go in. If we're in the garden, of course, it's a different matter, and then they really enjoy the company.

New girls

 The Bluebell girls are getting quite elderly, and we only have three left, so we decided it was time to add to the flock. We're delighted with the four new girls - 1 black rock and three speckeldys. As with the Bluebells, where the original leader of the flock was one of the two white hens (succeeded when she died suddenly by the other one), the black rock has immediately appointed herself Chicken-in-Charge, and is living up to her name, Pocahontas. (Well, it suited her.) The others are just a little younger, I think.

And seeing visitors

 Photo: RSPB website

Rather exciting to see one of these walking across the lawn this afternoon. It's a ring ouzel, presumably on its way into Britain and heading for the nearby moorland and summer nesting ground. I was hoping to get a photograph of it, but the resident blackbirds were very agressively seeing it off even as I spotted it. The population is in serious decline in here, so I count myself lucky to have had even a fleeting sight.

The jackdaws, meanwhile, are frantically flying in the most bizarre collection of potential nesting material, bits of fluff (deer and dog?), spare feathers - even an unattached pheasant wing, which was proudly conveyed to the nest site. Ten minutes later, it was lying on the lawn - rejected? too heavy to stay put? A little later still, it had disappeared again, replaced, I assumed, but then I saw one of the jackdaws flying away from the nest with it. I'm not sure whether it was a strange bird, poaching, or a disenchanted partner ("It's not hygienic, dear!") Five minutes later, and its proud finder was back again with the wing firmly clutched in its beak. I guess it has now been cemented in!

Watching the neighbours

Jackdaw by soikha

My new neighbours are a very industrious couple. They spend most of the day nest-building, having chosen a desirable site in the ash tree opposite my window, and I can't help watching when I'm supposed to be working. I can't see the nest itself, as it is deep in the ivy I've been threatening to remove - every spring when I decide to start work in the garden, the birds have beaten me to it and I resign myself to waiting until the nesting season is over. Somehow, come the autumn, nothing gets done.

This morning, Cor and Cora (as I am beginning to think of them) are prowling about the lawn collecting clumps of grass mowings, as well as venturing further in pursuit of sticks from around the field margins. Every few minutes they return with beaks full of spiky additions, sometimes flagging under the weight of a particularly choice item. One nearly fell off the branch just now. They are being watched beady-eyed by a pair of wood pigeons, who have previously raised the odd brood in the depths of the ivy (not very sucessfully, the squabs have a distressing tendency to make fatal descents from the heights), and there may yet be some nest-nabbing! Judging by the amount of sparrow activity in the ash tree, there are a number of smaller homes too - that's the excuse for not removing the ivy, it does offer such excellent habitat, though I do worry about the weight of it when the winds are high.

I rather look forward to young jackdaws - they will undoubtedly be noisy, and may be destructive, but I suspect they might prove amusing, if young starlings are anything to go by. The sparrowhawks, by the way, are back as predicted, and telling everyone about it at the top of their voices!

Blackbirds and thrushes

The blackbirds and thrushes sang in the green bushes…

goes the folk song. Our garden is full of them at the moment, all intent on feathering their nests and nurturing their genes. At this time of year one of my amusements is watching sparrow fights, in which a horde of shrieking fluttering little brown birds rampage round the garden, like small boys in the school playground. This morning, though, it was blackbirds – five of them whizzed past me and into the hawthorn hedge, where I wondered if they would escape without getting spiked, so intent were they on each other.

Now that I’m at my desk, two very handsome song thrushes are stalking round the lawn, while overhead two buzzards soar. They too have been very active in the last few days, with some aerobatic displays more readily associated with some of the more agile raptors. This year I think we are going to have the buzzards nesting in the wood at the foot of the garden, while the sparrowhawks will probably be back in their usual tree just beyond the paddock. With both lots of fledglings screaming imprecations at their parents it could be a noisy summer. If you haven’t heard a hungry young sparrowhawk, believe me, it can shriek for England!

It’s pretty noisy already, in fact. There is a rookery here, and now that the rooks are convinced that spring is here, activity is non-stop. They wake at about 4am, with sleepy squawks and grumbles, and by about 5.30 the air of full of creaks and groans as they gear up for another busy day of collecting twigs. It’s not just picking of sticks (there’s another folk song – I’m as bad as the birds today) from the ground, the trees are full of rooks bent on that perfect twig, tugging away with dogged determination. On the fringes are the jackdaws, but they can’t compete for noise. Rook activity goes on all day, foraging for food and sticks, then as dusk falls those who aren’t nesting gather in our ash trees in great flocks like a flight of broken umbrellas, before rising all at once in a black cloud, streaming overhead on their way to their night roost in the woods.

Spring flowers

Spring has certainly arrived in Devon, though there's still not much sign here in Northumberland - since I got back on Thursday it has been cold with a smattering of snow. I may go and buy some flowering bulbs to cheer up the garden!

Butterflies

This is the time of year when I fret about butterflies! Earlier in the year there seemed, yet again, to be very few in evidence, but in recent weeks there have been good numbers of red admirals, painted ladies, peacocks and large whites around the garden (especially on the buddlejas), with smaller numbers of small tortoiseshell. In the lane there are ringlets and meadow browns as well, although not in such large numbers as in good years. At the weekend I was delighted to see a small copper - pictured below - which isn't very common on our patch, and this made me think idly about keeping some sort of more formal record of the species I see.


The thought led me to the site of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, from where this picture comes, and where I discovered that there are two people recording species locally (which is done by walking the same route every week for six months of the year). One of them is on Lindisfarne, and the other just a few miles north. They are both recording all the species that I see regularly, as well as a couple more, such as the green-veined white, a butterfly I may well have seen without realising it. I must start looking at the white butterflies more closely.

It would be quite an undertaking for me to walk the same route every week at the moment - I'm away too much - so I am not going to join the scheme, but I walk our track most weeks and it would be interesting to get into the habit of using the recording methodology. Then, if I ever get the chance to retire, I can start doing it properly! Before I got so busy, I used to record for the Nature's Calendar Survey, which tracks wildlife in relation to climate (and ties in to the Spring and Autumnwatch surveys) so my observations will still be useful and I'll be able to compare them with my own records on that site. And maybe I can get younger son interested in taking part, as he takes the dogs along the lane most days (he was with me when we saw the small copper, and wanted to check on its identity as soon as we got home).

Swallows again

The infant swallows are getting bigger, and their parents are busy from dawn till dusk collecting insects (which is much appreciated by me!)

Baby swallows in the rain

These small black dots are baby swallows sitting on the lawn, waiting to be fed - I think it's too windy and rainy for them to fly, so their parents are making regular sorties with laden beaks. The picture was taken through the window because it's raining too hard to set foot outside, and anyway, I didn't want to disturb the poor things.

Rather better is this picture, taken by younger son at the beginning of the week, a much later brood of babies. Three heads, I believe, in a delightfully warm and feathery nest, some of the feathers, I rather think, contributed by the Bluebell Girls.


For weeks now, I have been regularly woken at dawn - about 3.30am at the solstice last month - by liquid bubblings and churrings just outside my open window: the swallow babies waiting for their breakfast. They line up on the guttering and wait for a bristling beakful of flies. At least when I look at my untidy garden I can console myself with the knowledge that it's a excellent hunting ground, helping to provide for good numbers of babies each year - swallows, flycatchers, wagtails, bats, and the ever-present and garrulous sparrows.

Flower of the Week

Water lily, June 2009

The joys of compost!

Common thyme, May 2009

Last weekend we emptied one of the compost bins. Some of it will be used to enrich the mix I use to pot up the tomato plants, some has gone around the newly-planted courgettes, and one container-full has been used to plant some salad leaves for cut-and-come-again cropping before other salads are ready. With such a rich growing medium I am hoping to get two crops out of a deep container.

Most of the lovely friable compost has gone towards building up the raised beds. Our soil here is heavy clay, and frustratingly difficult to break up, so a lot of effort goes into trying to improve it. It's only recently that we started a vegetable garden again so there's along way to go, but there's already a full compost bin ready to provide the next batch. And this year, for the first time, I am hoping to have the liquid from the wormery to feed the tomatoes and courgettes. I can't wait!

I suppose I might spare a little compost for OH's fuchsias, too.

Wordless Wednesday

Cherry blossom.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers...

If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year,
or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake,
and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would
be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!

So says Longfellow. My own heart, however, never fails to lift a little at this time of year, and I am constantly aware of a sense of purpose all around me, the air of full of twitterings and the rushing of wings. It's another bright sunny day, albeit with a chill wind, and I would much rather be out in the garden than working. My plan is spend some time outside this afternoon, if only I can get ahead with everything I need to do - faint hope, I suspect. It will be necessary to do some watering, though - we've had no real rain for some time, and things are getting very dry. That's the downside of growing plants in containers, I suppose.

In the woodland around the farm the gorse is out, and warm evenings are filled with an unexpected aroma of coconut. Around here it isn't too invasive, and can be enjoyed for its rich colour and long-flowering period - I don't think there is any month in the year when there isn't a whinbush flowering somewhere about the place - but I've noticed that on Dartmoor in recent years it is becoming all-pervasive, no doubt because the numbers of grazing sheep have been been reduced since foot-and-mouth.



The woods are full, too, of the delicate blossoms of gean, or bird cherry. Alongside the blowsy cultivated cherries, this native tree has a tendency to pale into insignificance, but it can be un unexpected joy in northern woodlands and, later in the year, the birds enjoy the small fruit. It's one of the native species I want to plant in our paddock.