I saw this article today in The Guardian and it helped me understand what’s been going on. I thought I’d been choosing the wrong plants for our changing weather, but no, it’s nature itself playing a wild card. “A large number of shrubs and...
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I like bird-watching and took part in the RSPB annual bird-watch on 29-30 January 2011 by counting the birds that visited my garden in one hour over that weekend. I saw 2 blackbirds, 7 blue tits, 2 great tits, 1 coal tit, 1 chaffinch, 2 green finches, 1 magpie, 2 robins, 2 wood pigeons and 2 dunnocks. I took some photos of birds that had eluded me before and I take my...
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I was sorting through photos taken over the Christmas holidays and came across this one of a herd of Fallow deer – Dama-dama. Fallow deer were introduced by the Romans and wild herds still live in wooden parts of southern England. It was taken on 28 December 2010 as we drove up for a walk on Ivinghoe Beacon in the Chiltern Hills. We were driving up towards...
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We have had beautiful hoar frosts that magically turn trees and plants white over night. Click here to open the gallery.Powered by Cincopa wp content plugins solution for your website and Cincopa MediaSend for file transfer.
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With the very cold weather, the birds are busy eating as many sunflower seeds and peanuts as they can in daytime hours. I’ve spent far too long trying to photograph them, but here they are. I also saw Coal Tits, Robins, Greenfinches, Chaffinches and Nuthatches but they proved more elusive. It’s not just the smaller garden birds, but Wood Pigeons and a family...
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Autumn is the time when I really notice spiders. I love the cleverness of their webs. This web is by one of the commonest British orb-web spiders, the Garden Spider, Araneus diadematus. It’s constructed by a female spider in two stages; first it is spun with non-sticky silk, with a central inner spiral created for the spider to await her prey, then secondly,...
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I have a Muehlenbeckia complexa, renowned for vigorous growth, and noticed that one tendril was growing so quickly that it had started to twine round the silk anchor strand from a spiders web. Amazing! Muehlenbeckia complexa Muehlenbeckia...
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