Hello everyone
Well, the weather has definitely taken a big turn for the worse recently—its more like mid November than October! However, when the weather deteriorates we often see more birds in the garden. They seem to know when the bad weather is coming, so they feed up on the goodies we provide for them.
In our garden, we’ve had lots of goldies, chaffinches and tits—mainly great and blue tits, but also cole and long tailed tits flitting about. The latter come in gangs and pass through. We saw a green woodpecker the other day. We sometimes hear its cackle but don’t see it. Martin tells me he saw a flock of swallows and martins recently. This is very late in the year for them, but they often have a late brood (their third brood!) particularly when the weather is good, which it was in September.
Down at Tuck Mill, they tell me that they see a kingfisher regularly, sitting on their wall and diving into the stream to catch small fish—how super!.
We went to visit friends in Salcombe in September, on a lovely sunny day, which brought out the butterflies. We saw several good ones, including blues and some clouded yellows, which come over from the continent in late Summer. I don’t know why they are called “clouded”, because they are bright yellow, with black tips to their wings.
I understand that there is a move to name a bird species as Britain’s National Bird. Many countries have their National Bird, such as the blue crane in South Africa and the resplendant quetzal in Guatemala,(name dropping!) but we don’t have one. I think ours should be the robin—don’t you?
Alan