Calstock

The Tamar Inn, Calstock on a busy afternoon. Interesting junk for sale further up the street.

proper job

Native bluebells showing off their characteristic deep blue violet colour. I hope they last until May. In local Cornish dialect "proper job" is used to describe anything truly appropriate or fitting to the task or well done. "Heller" is anything very bad or very good. And of course there is "dreckly" which notoriously means the same as manana but with less urgency.

first of the year

the first early purple orchid of the year in amongst the fading daffodils at the entrance to Duchy College.

another occasional find 2

white alkanet

This is a rare variant of green alkanet (which is blue of course), but an example appears most years in the same spot in a little lane nearby.

bullfinch

a bullfinch, a very occasional visitor to the niger seeds, with a goldfinch on the other side, spotted and described by Charlie Price aged 4yrs and 11 months. Well done Charlie!

at Treven farm

the blue season is almost upon us. The top picture is of greater periwinkle (vinca major). In the bottom picture is some green alkanet with the very vivid blue flowers with white eyelets, and around it the mat of prostrate stems and the small flowers of lesser periwinkle (vinca minor). The lesser vinca is a good flower for Easter as it "hath an excellent virtue to staunch bleeding at the nose in Christians if made into a garland and hung about the neck". (Not clear what non believers and infidels were to do). A further reference (Nicholas Culpeper) stated that "Venus owns this herb and saith that the leaves eaten by Man and Wife together cause love between them". Neither periwinkle is native to Britain

nesting

It has been fascinating to watch the great tits set about building the nest from scratch. The nest is constructed mainly of spaghnum moss brought in strand by strand with some downy feathers and hair or wool. Although the nest looks woven it is actually made by pushing the strands to the side. As the volume builds up the central concave part of the nest appears simply because it is where the birds sit to push the moss towards the sides. The male spends a large part of his time in the nest box pecking fiercely at the wood around the entrance (as above). It doesn't appear to be making the entrance larger but possibly it is making it smoother. They only have one brood a year so success is absolutely critical to each bird and hence they go to a lot of time and effort to make the nest secure and secret. I think they would both be deeply shocked if they knew how closely they were being watched deep in their own home.

No idea

another unidentified flying object. We have a lot of goldfinches in the garden but this does not look like the typical juvenile goldfinch. In fact it doesn't look like anything, especially from the front. Can anyone help with identification? A greenfinch?

PS now that I have had time to look at some decent photos on Wildabout Britain (link) it is clear that this a greenfinch.

blackthorn

Blackthorn is now out everywhere. The flowers always appear before the leaves and the black stems create beautiful tonal contrasts against the pastel colours in the hedgerows before the green returns.

IFO

A skylark singing. They are not always easy to see against a bright background but they are easy to hear. They seem to tremble in flight as they sing.

UFOs spotted

I know this is April 1, all fools day, but the photographs above are absolutely genuine and worth closer inspection. I noticed two small white round (to the naked eye) objects floating across the sky over us. They caught my attention because they did not seem to move like birds, floating rather than flying. Buzzards sometimes do this on thermals around here but they did not have the outline of a buzzard. They were moving steadily rather than swiftly west east, and looked very white in the morning sun. I took three photos, hard to get a very sharp focus pointing at the sky. To my surprise there was a third white thing to the top left, which I had not noticed, and two fuzzy white things. Maybe they are balloons. On the unresized RAW files they appear white with a fuzzy grey outline. Help!! I promise you this is not an April Fool's joke, and they are not camera artefacts or manipulated with photo imaging software. Very strange.

On close inspection I wonder if these are parachutes although there were no planes overhead at the time and I have never seen anyone parachute around here. The two lower photos are enlarged and slightly enhanced. And two more in the last photo I took yesterday.

a Spot of trespassing

actually, June, the owner of this cottage called Greenscombe in the wood, gave us permission to go into her meadow which runs beside the Tamar. Not far from here today we saw a kingfisher, and a greater spotted woodpecker, to add to the general pleasure of being out and about. Spot and I are due to give a talk to the local group of WI's next month, and with any luck June will be in the audience and we will use this picture as an example of quintessential rural England.

archangel time

yellow archangel making a sunny appearance

everyone's doing it 2

a chiffchaff (based definitively on its monotonous song!). I think this one is local and has spent the winter here rather than around the mediterranean (bad choice in my mind). The lane is now suddenly full of speckled wood butterflies. There are two male varieties apparently, a docile type with 4 spots on the hindwing, which sits around sunbathing, and this type with three wing spots on the hindwing, which spends all its time chasing off rivals up and down the lane .

everyone is doing it

sparrow and mistle thrush sing while mad midges dance in the evening sun

early starters

Bluebells normally flower in April and May around here so it is surprising to find this solitary specimen in flower. It looks like the spanish variety that is slowly spreading and hybridising with its less vigorous cousin our native bluebell. There are hundreds of plants developing nearby but none are anywhere near flowering.

And a peacock basking in the unfamiliar warmth of the March sun, staying still long enough to be captured on camera

more loud singing

 greenfinch

the air is full of birdsong because every male bird seems to be shouting at the top of his voice. At this time of year just before the leaves appear  they are much easier to spot.

chaffinch

sea side flowers

Sea campion is a close relative of  red campion and has the same pattern of five deeply divided petals.

Dogviolets are hardy plants that will grow almost anywhere.

Thrift is a sea side specialist and loves these barren rocky and salty places.

Life of Harriet

It's a sign, it's a sign, we must carry a shoe in our mouths.

Cormorant at Downderry

we have several Kurt Jackson paintings (from a time when he was very inexpensive) but he didn't paint this one

pond skaters do battle

he who trembles most, wins

the world is alive with the sound of living

Life is stirring; the air is buzzing with the hum of bumble bees and hoverflies, brimstones, peacocks and commas are emerging, celandines, daffodils, wood anemones and dog violets are in flower, long tailed tits, wrens, robins, great tits are singing out, buzzards are pairing up by soaring on Spring thermals, the fish were leaping out of the water. Spring.

 wood anemone

 comma and celandine

 robin singing his socks off

One thing I have noticed is that the first butterflies to emerge in early Spring are much more frisky and easily unsettled than later in the year and therefore harder to photograph. This is surprising given that it remains quite cool especially in the morning. It may be because as there are fewer of them at this time of year they are more conspicuous targets for birds and other predators, so it pays to be more agile.

Tutwell

the little hamlet of Tutwell, where Uncle Max was born, Dartmoor in the distance. Tutwell sits on the top of the Tamar valley. In the panorama below it is to the left, and a little hamlet called Townlake in Devon on the other side of the valley is visible to the right. As usual the photo has suffered from making it fit onto the blog page!

top of the hill

entrance to our village this afternoon, (with traffic sign impedimenta and bins removed, if only planning and highway law were so simple). See link for same view from an earlier page from this blog with different flowers and more information.

three favourites

butterbur, spot the native daffodil, and a crowd of ghostly mother superiors leaving this morning's woodland service

catkins

annual catkin photo against non annual blue sky, and, below, masses of very juvenile tadpoles. The greenish tinge in the middle of the photo is caused by the residual egg sacs from which they have emerged and which they are still feeding on. Unfortunately, it is very dry and like last year I think there is a real risk that these puddles will dry up before the tadpoles can mature.

sling your hook

it was a quiet, foggy morning and the trees were full of these little hammock webs, designed it seems to catch the little midges that tend to fly up and down in little mating clouds at this time of year.