Or red cheeked face considering the cock pheasant and the grey squirrel feeding together. The squirrel drops bits of peanut and the pheasant says, 'Thank you.' It also says the same to the tits who are so picky they take a seed, chuck it a way, take another and so on until they find one they like. This, of course benefits the ground feeding birds like the pheasant, doves, pigeons and chaffinches.
The weekend gone was the one of the Great British Birdwatch organised by the RSPB - we were all doing timed garden bird watching counting numbers and species.
The kestrel kept away this time! It would be great to have rarity in the garden but it is really the numbers of common birds that is important - to see how they are doing this year with the wet mild weather.
There goes a wren but it was not there during my hour?
The food was peanuts and a mixture of Nyger and black sunflower seed as usual but I was tempted to stick an apple, in halves, on the ground too. This netted me a blackbird or two. There, I am a cheat.
These are the feeders on one of the sheds - four goldfinches on the left, a blue tit on the peanuts on the right. Note it is a so called squirrel proof feeder and it has worked - so far.
So it was mostly tits, finches and sparrows.
The rooks are having a ball up in rook town next door. They never stop chattering like a forest full of gossips.
And then I tried to upload my information and the site had crashed! This birdwatch is getting too popular. Trouble is the website was a cock pheasant up, would not let me in - drove me peanuts!
Weather - good old British subject and have we not had a load of it. One minute it is raining and dark, the next the sun is out as here.
I don wellies and head out and come in and take them off again.
It is midwinter and I can just about accept the snowdrops being early then I look and the wallflowers are coming out.
Nice to have their scent along with the sarcococcus and winter honeysuckle but, really, seasons are seasons and should behave properly.
I have just read and article in the paper from Helen Yemm - well, she is answering a reader query - about Magnolia grandiflora not flowering. She says it will take at least 12 years before it flowers - so, mine was about three years old when I planted it seven years ago - that makes 10, so another three years to go.
It had better be worth it when and if it happens.
I have been reading the Cally Gardens 2014 catalogue - Michael Wickenden bemoans the problems today of plant hunting - he was going to Burma but has had to call it off. You can find the text of a lecture he has given at - http://www.callygardens.co.uk/The-Nurseryman-as-Plant-Hunter.pdf.
He mentions the ridiculous concept of patenting genes.
I can understand it, perhaps, if someone made a gene but as most of them have been around for millions of years it all seems a bit crazy.
Anyway no one in their right mind would want any of my genetic material.
Though my cousin Linda has said I have kind eyes.
I wonder what kind?
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