Today’s guest picture is a pair of regal pelicans in a royal park in London. My sister Mary enjoyed their company.
After yesterday’s grand tour, I had a gentle morning which was enhanced by a couple of scones and the presence of Dropscone himself at coffee time. He has been away acting as an official at the Scottish Boys Golf Championship for a few days so I have been living in a scone free zone.
After he left, I got the lawn mower out and squashed some moss in a rather pointless way on the middle lawn. In an effort to improve things, I got out a garden fork and tested my new knee’s ability to spike the lawn. It stood up to the task well but I only did a small piece not wanting to push my luck too far.
I laid down the fork and picked up the camera instead.
Mrs Tootlepedal has a nice selection of daffodils on the go.
Other colours are available too.
There was a bee about which is always good to see.
It was enjoying the pulmonaria. I tried to take a flying bee of the day.
They move their wings much faster than a chaffinch!
The chance of catching a flying bird at the feeder was very slim as the good weather has taken the small birds out of the garden to treats in the field and forest.
We were left with the occasional blackbird…
…with a shifty looking jackdaw and a plump pigeon.
After lunch, we went off to Longtown to get our eyes tested as there is no optician in Langholm. Mrs Tootlepedal went in first and then disappeared on a shopping jaunt while I got my eyes seen to. I have a good eye and a bad eye and it turned out that my good eye has got better and my bad eye has g. This should speed up blog production by a huge amount.
When I had finished, I went for a walk round the Longtown ponds.
I saw a pair of Canada geese…
…and what I thought was a tufted duck…
…and a goosander….
…among other water birds too far away fro me to recognise.
The ponds are lined with willows and they caught the slightly hazy sun.
The ponds were the fullest that I have seen them…
…although the river is not very high.
I couldn’t walk this way without taking a picture of the Longtown bridge.
In spite of the slightly hazy conditions, it was warm enough to walk around without a jacket on and I thoroughly enjoyed my walk. I met Mrs Tootlepedal as I got near the town on my return.
We strolled back together, admiring the wild flowers beside the path.
Celandine and butterbur
We are heading back to wet and windy weather at the weekend but this mini spell of warm and sunny weather has been most welcome.
My mobile phone had stopped working yesterday afternoon and when we got home, I spent a frustrating amount of time trying to find a reason for the breakdown by searching my provider’s website. This is the sort of thing that induces blinding headaches, broken crockery and stamping of feet. The peak rage moment was holding a phone with a numeric dialling pad and being asked to by a robot to enter the sixth letter of my password on the keypad. “If it is A B or C or 2, just press 2.”
I finally found a real person to talk to and rather anti-climatically, the solution to my problem was to take my SIM card out and put it back again. I should have guessed.
In the evening, Mrs Tootlepedal went off to a meeting of the Ewes WRI and Sandy and I went to the Archive Centre where an impeccably behaved internet connection allowed us to put two weeks of the newspaper index into the database.
In the absence of obliging chaffinches, a Longtown goosander comes in as flying bird of the day.
That’s a nice Goosander flying picture! 🙂
Thank you HJ.
The daffodils and primroses are nice to see and so are the willows along the shore. Ours should be out any day now.
I’ve never seen or heard of the butterbur but it’s supposed to grow in this part of the country. It’s a nice looking flower and I don’t know how I’ve missed it.
It seems to grow in neglected ground and is fairly dull from a distance.
I don’t know which eye you use for photography, but I would say that it is a great one, as your photos prove!
I’m loving the flowers from Mrs. T’s garden already, I can’t wait for more of them to bloom.
Your tufted duck is very similar to our ring-necked duck, but yours has the added tuft of feathers to make it even more interesting.
It was a pity that it was so far away.
Oh, the joys of talking to an actual person when you’re calling about a problem – if you have enough crockery to last to that point!
He was very helpful too when I finally found him.
I don’t think we have goosanders here.
They are very handsome birds and the female has a wonderfully punk hairstyle.
Lovely Spring post, liked all the the colour in the garden, Mrs T is a wizard in that direction, and particularly enjoyed the flying goosander.
What a splendid garden you have! Mine is very overgrown and wild and could do with some colour. It is overwhelmingly green. For some reason I don’t associate London with pelicans so that photo was a surprise. I’d never heard of a goosander before.Is it actually a kind of goose? Oh dear, I know the feeling of not being able to talk to a real person on the phone. I usually have to wait 1/2 hour only to be told it’s not the right department.
It is a duck I think. The Americans have the same bird and call it a merganser.
Hope your efforts on the lawn will be rewarded. Glad of the eye improvement. Excellent FBOD picture.
My mother was told some years ago that there is a limit to how long-sighted you get. The process then goes into reverse. She was hoping for perfect vision again but unfortunately other problems cropped up. Such is life! You are fortunate to see Goosanders regularly. The only times I have seen them are when we are in the Lake District. I like Tufted Ducks – they sometimes visit our pond and catch a few fish.
I would like to live nearer to a good sized pond.
They are wonderful wildlife magnets.
Those daffodils are like little rays of warm sunshine — which we need in my neck of the woods! Beautiful!
I laughed out loud at your description of trying to solve a cell phone problem over their web site. Spot on!! And getting a real person to speak to is harder than gaining access to the Queen!
I was fortunate to be able to unearth a non robot number from the unhelpful help pages.
Splendid flying bird of the day.
I was pleased to catch it.
Happy to read you survived a customer service call with your cell phone provider! As much an accomplishment as getting through knee replacement surgery! I very much enjoyed your photos today.
Customer service is the pair of words with the least meaning in the world.
An oxymoron!
Exactly.
Thank goodness for the end of the scone free zone!
🙂
It’s lovely to see the bees isn’t it? I was gardening on Momday and they were buzzing all around me. They seem to love the pulmonaria. The solution to most technical probelems seems to be switching things off and on again or taking out SIM cards and replacing them.
It works nine times out of ten. It is the tenth time that hurts.