You remember those little nuthatch hatchlings I showed you last week? That was not the beginning of the story of course. Here are some great tit eggs. The mother has been laying them day by day, allowing them to get cold as she disappears to feed. Then, when she’s laid the lot, she starts to incubate them. They warm up as her body covers them, and lo! They hatch at pretty much the same time as each other. Will they all make it to leaving-the-nest stage? That is another story …
Monday Portrait
Mondays at the moment are when I help some of the Wildlife Team here at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal as we check nestboxes round and about the estate. I’m very much a junior member of the team – lots to learn. The questions change as the season progresses. Which boxes are occupied? (by no means all). Which boxes have meticulously constructed nests within – different species, different nesting styles? Which ones have eggs? How many? Covered or uncovered? Cold? Meaning more will be laid. Or warm? Meaning they are about to be incubated. Is there an adult sitting on said eggs? And now – increasingly – have they hatched? Are the absent parents out and about frantically securing food for those ever-open mouths. Which nests – partly finished or fully constructed have been deserted?
The first photo is of nuthatch hatchlings, maybe four days old, courtesy of Colin, a fellow volunteer. My – slightly fuzzier -photo is of some even younger blue tits.
It’s a tough year. It’s been cold, and insects and caterpillars simply aren’t about. Food is hard to come by. Eggs are abandoned, hatchlings starve. Today wasn’t as bad as we feared, and we were glad to see so many boxes with eggs yet to hatch, just as – finally – the temperatures are promised to rise this week.
For Monday Portrait.
I did rather wonder why not a single soul had either ‘liked’ or commented on this post. It turned out to be simple. I hadn’t pressed ‘publish’ after I had written it …
Looking for Birds Beginning with P last week, I came upon other birds, which didn’t. What many of them did have was their being water birds. The pair in the header shot are godwits. Here are a few others:
A heron, a juvenile herring gull, and four cormorants.
They’re for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness. And, why not? also for Beth’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: On the Water – more later, in colour!
Monochrome Madness? Possibly. This week, Sarah’s calling for things beginning with P. I’ve picked birds. Birds beginning with P.
I need to confess that not one of the birds featured below is a passerine, though this order of birds accounts for about half of all bird species. Peacocks, puffins, parakeets, pigeons, pelicans, pheasants – none of them fits the bill. The raven in my featured photo is a passerine however. Though he doesn’t begin with P …
For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, hosted today by Sarah of Travel with Me.
You know the sort of day. When things just go right. When, perhaps unexpectedly, you have your camera with you just when one of the flighty, nervy Neighbourhood Squirrels is posing nicely, as ours was one day last week.
When, camera in hand, you manage to point-and-shoot at just the right moment. These images come from a long-past day in the Farne Islands when the Arctic Terns, frantic to protect their young, wheeled and dive-bombed overhead, giving chance after chance for action-packed shots even to a strictly amateur type like me. We had no idea where their nests and babies were and certainly weren’t going to go looking.
There were those red squirrels in Málaga, who managed to forget me for just long enough for me to whip my camera out …
Or that heron in Córdoba. It wasn’t so much the heron I was afraid of losing, as this collage of evening light.
Sofia, of Photographias fame wants us to showcase those moments for this week’s Lens Artists Challenge: Lucky Shot. Thanks Sofia, for helping us remember those joyful lucky seconds.
This week, PR is our host for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, and has chosen Minimalism. Look at PR’s post on the subject to see some fine examples. I didn’t find this too easy. But I had a go.
Fog can be our friend here …
… as can dusk …
… and a flying machine to keep the lampost company. Otherwise it’s all about the natural world.
Here are a few plants that might work.
I found some peacock feathers …
… a bird or two …
… cherry blossom …
…and a solitary tree at Brimham Rocks, spotted last week.
I’ve a feeling these are only a little bit minimalist. Why don’t you have a go, and do much better? Link your post to PR and to Leanne’s post, at the links above and we’ll all come and have a look.
Here he is. The world’s largest rodent. The capybara. He lives in Barcelona’s Cosmo-Caixa Science Museum, in the Bosc Inundat (Flooded Forest) . This, along with other South American species, is part of a huge simulated Amazon rainforest ecosystem, with animals, birds and fish.
Monday Portrait
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it
Mary Oliver
For this week’s Lens Artist Challenge, Beth asks us to show shots of what has astonished us, and takes her inspiration from this short poem by Mary Oliver.
For some reason, my mind was drawn back to Lockdown. For us, Daily Exercise was one of the pleasures of that peculiar time. Country dwellers, we could range freely over our home patch without meeting a soul. And here, it happened to be a wonderful spring, where plants, birds and all life could flourish in balmy temperatures and just the right amount of rain.
Walking by myself down deserted paths – M was exploring on his bike – I discovered Wonder and Astonishment anew. Day by day, I could watch leaves unfurl from tightly-bound buds; flowers appear; lambs totter their first hesitant steps.
I had the leisure to enjoy the intricately-designed feathers of a common-or-garden mallard, or the complexity of dandelion petals.
Best of all, creatures we rarely saw close up crossed my path. Who expects to stumble by a toad on a riverside stroll? Or, best of all, come across shy curlews nesting within a foot of a normally well-used road across the moors.
Skies, undefaced by plane trails seemed more multi-faceted and interesting. And back home, day after day, hour after hour, from dawn until darkness, this thrush gave an apparently unending performance with almost no breaks.
Such a time of loneliness, grief and isolation for many remains in my memory a period of joy in the rediscovery of the astonishment offered by the countryside just outside our front door.
My computer is extremely poorly and our techie support shop has taken an extended Christmas break – and why not? It explains my absence from the blogosphere and my somewhat cursory response to comments. Normal service may be resumed one day. Meanwhile – Happy New Year to all fellow-bloggers and all of you who read my blog. Thank you for being such a supportive community and great company.
Brian’s Last on the Card
My Monday Portrait is not of reindeer: but I hope this group of red deer stags will prove acceptable to Father Christmas as he packs up his deliveries on Wednesday evening.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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