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 .