Category: Wildlife

Monday Portrait meets Post from the Past

With what joy we greeted the lizards we encountered on our recent Balkan Journey! How we miss the companions who shared our daily life in France, during the summer months, at least.

Here‘s what I wrote about them, ten whole years ago:

Summer’s arrived: well, this week anyway.  So from before breakfast until long after the evening meal we’re spending as much time as we can out in the garden.  And we have plenty of company.  Lizards.  Common wall lizards, podarcis muralis.  They are indeed spectacularly common here.  We have no idea exactly where they live, but there are plenty who call our garden ‘home’.  We’re beginning to get to know a few.

Easily the most identifiable is Ms. Forktail, she of the two tails.  She’s the only one we’ve been able to sex conclusively as well, because we caught her ‘in flagrante’ with Mr. Big behind the gas bottles recently.  And then the next day she was making eyes at a younger, lither specimen, and the day after that it was someone else.  She’s lowering the moral tone of our back yard.

Then there’s Longstump, who’s lost a tiny portion of tail, and Mr. Stumpy, who hasn’t got one at all, though it seems not to bother him.  Redthroat has a patch of crimson under her chin.  There are several youngsters who zip around with enthusiasm and incredible speed.

Longstump

In fact they all divide their time between sitting motionless for many minutes on end, and suddenly accelerating, at top speed and usually for no apparent reason, from one end of the garden to the other, or vertically up the wall that supports our young wisteria. On hot days like this  (36 degrees and counting) they’ll seem to be waving at us.  Really they’re just cooling a foot, sizzled on the hot wood or concrete.  Sometimes you’ll see them chomping their way through some insect they’ve hunted, but often they’ll step carelessly and without interest over an ant or other miniature creepy-crawly in their path.

‘Our’ lizards on their personal sun-loungers

Mainly they ignore one another, but sometimes there are tussles.  These may end with an uneasy standoff, or with the two concerned knotted briefly together in what could scarcely be described as an act of love.

Happy hour for Longstump

We could spend hours watching them, and sometimes we do.  But there is still a bathroom to build, a workroom to fit out, and a pergola to design.  The kings and queens of the yard have no such worries.  They can do anything: they choose not to.

A Pride of Peacocks

These peacocks live in North Macedonia, where they have, uninvited but none the less welcome, taken up residence at the hotel we stayed at on the shores of Lake Ohrid, St. Naum. I think they can speak for themselves – as they did, very noisily, every morning.

The rear view proved just as interesting as that draped tail.

… for a few moments – at rest.

And now … a peacock in action. Not for nothing is one of its collective nouns an Ostentation of Peacocks.

I’ll be honest. I conceived and wrote this post as a Monday Portrait. But then Tina’s Lens-Artists Challenge dropped into my in-box: ‘The eyes have it’. I’m not entirely sure she had peacocks in mind, but the hundreds of ‘eyes’ that make up the peacock’s tail, and that slightly penetrating gaze displayed in that head shot allowed me to think I might get away with including this post in the challenge.

Am I too late … ?

I wanted to be in the Monday Portrait from Prespa, but the birds got there first. Am I too late? It’s not Monday? Well, I’m here now …

Look, I got here as soon as I could … And now I’m here, you might wait till I’m properly in shot.

… I’ve had to overcome all kinds of difficulties …

But here I am, ready for my profile to be shown to best advantage.

And by the way: that feature photo. Those gnarled old olive stumps are quite my favourite spot.

Balkan Postcards 8: Breakfast Time for the Great White Egret

After my own breakfast, I had just half an hour to spare to watch this great white egret hunt for his. While I was there, he caught just two small fish. The nearby hens were busy too, as you can hear.

Our Prespa adventure is over now: our Balkan adventure is not. To be continued …

Balkan postcards 7: Pastoral Prespa.

Today was a day of birdsong: of nightingales without end, of golden orioles and hoopoes. It was a day to watch bee-eaters, pelicans, grey herons, night herons flying over the lake. It was a day to watch sows idling away the morning under a shady tree, or goats commandeering the hillside. Or to see a wild tortoise lumbering across the path.

Birdsong in the woods

Balkan Postcards 6: Postcards from Prespa

Today, we journeyed to Lake Prespa, Grecian section. To Little Prespa to be exact. We are staying on an island where we were promised a cacophony of frogs – all night – and a plethora of pelicans. The frogs are delivering: but the pelicans, up to perhaps 80% of them, have been decimated by avian flu. They were not there to greet us as we hoped. But aided by powerful lenses, we finally saw them. Trust me, they’re there, and there in abundance, roughly in the middle of the first shot.

Little Prespa and its pelicans, behind a carpet of asphodels.

I’ll send just one more postcard this evening, taken just as the sun set.

Just two stories from Ukraine

Back in March, I brought a daily diary, by Yevgenia Belorusets from Kyiv to your attention.  It went silent nearly two weeks ago.  But news from Ukraine is unremitting, and none of it good. 

I thought it would be good to remember that Ukrainians are so much more than victims, and fighters for their country.  They have towns, cities and countryside that are important to them.  They have a cultural life that mustn’t be extinguished.  Here are two stories to remind us of that.  The first is from the Guardian’s Country Diary last week.  Here, Olexandr Ruchko describes the annual arrival of the storks to his homeland.

This stork is in Spain.  But his cousins are now in Ukraine.

The next is about a children’s choir, the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, Kyiv.

Do have a look at their website, and listen to the two pieces you’ll find there.  They’d like you to share this site, and share it again, so their music continues to live on, even though the choir members are scattered: https://choiroftheearth.com/shchedryk-childrens-choir-kyiv

Many of you, by ‘liking’ a previous post, enabled me to give a donation to World Central Kitchens, which works in Ukraine and disaster zones throughout the world. Here‘s a link, in case you too are interested in donating.

My header image recalls the Ukrainian flag.  Though this image was taken in North Yorkshire, it reminds us that Ukraine is, in normal times, the Breadbasket of Europe.

As it happens, Brian Butler, in his engaging Travel Between the Pages blog, features today a short video of Kyiv, as it experienced a normal day, only last summer. You can view it here.

Monday Portrait

It wasn’t much more than a year ago. I was walking in the grounds of Fountains Abbey when I heard a vicious one-sided conversation going on above me. It was a squirrel, a very heated and angry squirrel, who evidently had a great deal to complain about. Maybe it was me he was angry with. I never found out. The complaining went on long after I’d gone out of his sight.