Bird songs stop me in my tracks
At 3.30 one afternoon, just as April was tiptoeing into May, my daughter was walking round Alners Gorse and sent me a video of a nightingale singing in a nearby bush.
I found something on my clever computer which told me about the number of phrases in the repertoire of some of our most tuneful birds.
A lark has 340, a blackbird more than 100, a song thrush up to 50, likewise a curlew, but the bird that beats the lot is the nightingale that can sing up to 1000!
Although one of my favourite birds is the curlew, all bird song is so incredible it stops me in my tracks.
The nightingale however has phrases which vary from whispers to something that almost moves me to tears it is so beautiful. All these phrases can vary with each individual bird but even so each one is most impressive, if for no other reason than someone, somewhere has the talent to work out how to make these counts.
I like ponds
Towards the end of February my ponds, both big and small, were completely emptied as a general clean up and to try to get rid of the mass of blanket weed. At the bottom of the big pond there were three frogs that remained sitting there whilst it was being refilled. Six days later, a mass of frog spawn appeared.
Not surprisingly, this turned to a gooey mess after that particularly hard frost we had. A few hardy little tadpoles survived for a while, but these met an unfortunate end, suffocated or strangled amongst the mass of blanket weed that had once again taken hold. I had been using a nature friendly solution once a week to rid of the stuff but it was obvious that I was losing the battle so I bought some barley straw logs. These seemed to be doing the trick for a while, but now my ponds look so miserable that I don’t know whether I need twice as many logs or to call in the services of a pond specialist.
If anyone reading this knows what I should do, please contact me. I am getting desperate to the point of having the whole thing filled in and turning it into part of a rockery and that really seems one problem too many. Anyway, I like ponds.
My Robins – Mr or Mrs Fraser?
I do wish robins had worked out some way of distinguishing themselves between male and female.
I suppose they know, which is the important thing.
I have called my regular visiting one Fraser, for no particular reason, but now I also have two youngsters who have been brought here by either Mr or Mrs Fraser.
Whichever one it was proved to be a most attentive mother/father who, in less than a week, taught them to fend for themselves.
Some days they formed a rather disorderly queue of two but one day, mother/father tried to exert a bit of parental authority by having a feed itself and was actually seen off by junior.
Lessons for the young in bird world it seems, can only go so far.
I have at last managed to get out on Genevieve!
It is such a relief, I don’t know why I was making such a fuss about it.
My first trip was down Rowden Mill Lane and the things I most appreciated were the scents and the bird song that was so much more varied than that which I hear from the garden. The cow parsley is in great swathes – I think that is where the scents were coming from – but what I found even more interesting was that there was the sound of insects, lots of them buzzing all over the flowers.
I haven’t heard that for some time and although most of the sound seemed to come from different sorts of flies, it didn’t matter. They were all doing an important job.
My second trip was round The Wheel just after the floods. There were certainly signs of them though. Along that top road, the ditch was full in front of the willow where, I am told, there used to be a pond. This ditch often fills right up after a lot of rain and flows over the road.
Plusess in my life – seeing bluebells on Bulbarrow
Whilst on the subject of all the plusses in my life, I can now get into my daughter’s car because it has higher seats and I have a swivelling thing to sit on, a present from a kind friend. ~ This means that my son-in-law has twice taken me out for a drive.
The last one was to Bulbarrow to see the bluebells. What a sight they are.
Every year they seem to get better. How anyone can drive past them at speed without stopping to stare beats me.