FAUNA TIME AND A SHORT BLETHER

Plenty of birds but not many bees (Jewel Akens?)

It is a dark damp November morning and the garden is sodden. I am gazing out of my window at the work that need to be done when, suddenly, there is a flash of colour, and another, and several.
I have put some Niger seed into a mix with sunflower seed in a feeder and goldfinches have arrived, as always not singly but in a small flock.
The blue, great and coal tits continue to muscle in and the dunnocks, robins and chaffinches wander about underneath hoping for dropped seed.
We do get bigger regulars - pheasants and wood pigeons - but I have not seen the collared doves for a while. Wrens skulk, high-sterned galleons hunting the shrubbery.

I have cut down the perennials in the back bed by the front door - as I have said before, the front door is at the back of the house - and taken the dead and dying vegetation to the compost heap. I also began the collection of fallen leaves and put them into my builders' sack to compost down to leaf mould.

On arrival at the veg beds I discovered the new spring above the apple tree in full flood, the water running onto the paths around the bass and making surrounding grass a quagmire. I am not sure what to do about this - pray for a drought?

Here is one of our grey squirrels caught with a red face stealing my peanuts. It has forced entry to the feeder with its wire-cutter teeth. I have bought a squirrel proof feeder - Ha! - and given up on this one. They can have the peanuts - if I let them have this feeder perhaps they will leave the rest alone.

There are some branches and many twigs down in the wood. Whilst we were away there must have been a gale. The big stuff will go for a bonfire, the smaller twigs put under the eaves to dry and be used as kindling.

Talking of animals, and nothing to do with our garden - saw in the paper one of the dogs the Yorkshire Branch were training up to be a Hearing Dog - to help the deaf like Guide Dogs for the Blind - when it was 8 weeks old,  they discovered it was not responding as it should to instructions. It was stone deaf!

We still see the odd bunny but I wonder if the dreaded myxomatosis has re-emerged.

I look out on the lawns and see the fallen leaves in the grass but do not worry - my buddies, the earthworms, will drag the leaves underground, I hope, unless the thrushes and blackbirds have eaten the lot - the worms not the leaves - now there is an idea, leaf eating birds. I must talk to my local genetic scientist - perhaps we could insert a herbivore gene into rooks and starlings?

You know, all this blogging is just a bag of hot air - a rising bubble of blethering, a random rabbiting, a pompous pontification. (Thesaurus out!)
So, I wondered which of my many photographs would be most irrelevant to a garden blog - try this one!