Being Mrs C

Garden help

Look at who came to help me plant the rest of the spring bulbs in the garden this morning.

 

This particular robin always seems to appear when either Mr C or I are out doing anything in the garden. Today, he sat on the fence for a while watching me dig holes for the bulbs. When I'd finished he even decided to inspect things more closely!

At times he was only a foot away from me and he didn't seem at all bothered that I was there. Luckily I had the camera to hand, but taking good bird photos with a small point and shoot camera isn't exactly easy.

A wet weekend

After an incredibly wet Saturday we were woken in the early hours of Sunday morning by yet more rain. Looking out of the bedroom window the wind was raging, the road turned into a river and several rumbles of thunder passing overhead. We therefore headed down to the WWA this afternoon expecting to see some degree of damage from the weather. Luckily we were proved wrong.

The butterfly garden seemed to have escaped the worst of the wind, and with only a couple of small exceptions, most of the plans were still standing proud. There weren't that many butterflies to be seen today, but the bees did seem to be out in force.

The coots that live on the Mere were out and about with their chicks. We think there were eight in total. Quite an impressive number when you consider that the heron was keeping a keen watch on them from afar.

They are such incredibly cute fluffy bundles, but catching that look in a photo is somewhat difficult!

The rain had certainly made a difference to our new pond on site. We think that the water level must have risen about at least 3 inches in the last 24 hours. As I sit here typing this we're in the middle of another storm, so by now it may have increased further!

The water was a bit too murky to be able to see much life apart from that on the water's surface. It looks promising though as there were quite a few pond skaters visible, and what may have been a leech at the water's edge. (Mr C's currently looking it up to see if we were correct or not) As we walked away a large dragonfly also came to visit. A good sign that the pond is attracting exactly the sort of wildlife that we were hoping it would.

Spring has sprung

If you're in the UK and like nature then you should definitely make sure that you watch the new series of Springwatch on BBC 2.

I'm completely addicted at the moment, and am also loving the encyclopaedic knowledge of new presenter Chris Packham. The random nature related facts that he keeps throwing into every conversation reminds me so much of Stephen Fry on QI!

As someone quite new to bird watching I loved the small segment that Simon King did on tonight's programme on identifying different woodland birds by their song. Fantastic!

Birds, birds, birds...

We've had quite a quiet Easter weekend, but it seems that we've actually been quite busy looking at birds and making the most of our RSPB membership.

On Saturday we headed into the centre of St Albans to Verulam Park where there are currently a large number of herons nesting on the island in the centre of the lake there. We read in the local paper about how the RSPB had set up a viewing facility there for the public to get a better view of the nests and chicks. Unfortunately the day that we went along this didn't seem to be operating. Still, with the binoculars that I got for Christmas and Mr C's big camera lens we get a pretty good view. 

You obviously can't take pictures with binoculars though so you'll have to rely on Mr C's photographic evidence. 

On bank holiday Monday we went along to the Rye Meads reserve over by the River Lee. The reserve is jointly run by the RSPB and Herts & Middlesex Wildlife Trust and has a total of ten hides across the wetlands reserve to allow visitors to get a good sight of the local wildlife. Once again, photographic evidence is provided by Mr C. 

One thing the visit did make me realise is how few birds I actually recognise. The photographs at least allow us to come back and in our own time compare the photos with what is in the bird books. It'd be much more useful though if I could actually recognise them in real time. A trick I'm still to master!

Pond digging

This morning was one of the monthly working parties down at the WWA and today we started work on the new nature pond that we are creating.

Previous attempts had been made at digging the pond out by hand, but we soon realised that doing so would be a little bit more difficult than we first imagined. Instead we hired a mini digger for this working party so that we could make a real difference in starting the pond, rather than just the shallow attempt we had before.

 

Mr C looked like a small child at Christmas when he got to use the digger and I'm pleased to say that he seemed to be doing a pretty proficient job of it. Maybe he should consider JCB driver as a new career choice if the current one doesn't work out.

The aim is for the pond to provide a habitat for amphibian and insects that like to live in or near water. It looked like some creatures were already impressed with the work we'd done as we managed to see several newts in the water, as well as a pond skater on the surface and this little frog in the grass nearby. They do say that nature will start to inhabit new ponds pretty quickly, but we had no idea it would be quite this quick!