Today’s guest picture is another from our older son’s visit to Anstruther and shows that he took his friends with him.
Another of the regular Moorland bird feeders was away on holiday today so I had a second opportunity this week to act as a fill-in feeder filler so I went up after breakfast to do my duty. If the weather is good, which it was today, the duty is also a pleasure as it gives me a chance to sit in the hide and watch the birds. We are not feeding birds in the garden at present so it is an extra pleasure to do a little bird watching from the comfort of the hide.
I had a good variety of birds to watch today. There was a host of siskins….
…but only one greenfinch and tree sparrow that I could see.
Either a jay paid several visits of several jays paid one visit each but one way or the other, there were plenty of opportunities for jay watching. (I was hoping to get a shot of jay walking but alas, no.)
There were a very few blue and great tits about…
…but I didn’t see a coal tit today at all.
My chief entertainment came from some very obliging woodpeckers who came up close to the hide and stayed nice and still and sometimes even ‘watched the birdie’.
My Lumix was on its best behaviour after having refused to work at all and it came in handy. (It knows that I have ordered a new camera. Too late now.)
The one in the bottom left corner was the first arrival. The other three pictures are all of another bird which arrived twenty minutes later.
After our recent warm weather, it was a lot cooler today and I began to feel a little chilly and left the woodpeckers to it and came home.
I had a cup of coffee, did the crossword and then went out into the garden to see what Mrs Tootlepedal was up to and to take a picture or two while I was out there.
Mrs Tootlepedal was busy planting out new flowers and I looked at some old friends.
A Rodgersia and a Spirea had a competition to see which could pack most flowers into the smallest space.
At lunchtime, Mrs Tootlepedal went off to help out at the Buccleuch Centre which was putting on a show for children and I had some potato soup and cheese to get my strength up and went out and mowed the greenhouse grass and the drying green and then sieved some compost.
There was a lot of buzzing so I paused from time to time to look at the cotoneaster and the astrantia which are still attracting a lot of interest.
Mrs Tootlepedal came back and got straight down to some more planting and tidying and I lent a hand and did some dead heading and tidying of my own. I even did some weeding on the middle lawn. The large amount of grass and flower pollen floating about at the moment is not helping my breathing so any work I do is done at a very gentle pace with regular visits indoors for a little rest. Mrs Tootlepedal on the other hand just carries on regardless. She is a human dynamo in the garden.
She notices things too and called my attention to a red admiral butterfly sunning itself on a path.
Like the woodpeckers earlier in the day, it sat very still for its portrait.
I took a last set of flower pictures….
…and then we went off shopping to stock up on food and supplies. By great fortune, our food shopping managed to include some scones and clotted cream. We are not quite certain how this happened but we managed to get rid of them when we got home by eating them with the recently made strawberry jam. We haven’t had a cream tea for ages so this was a real treat.
I was considering an evening cycle ride in the hope that the wind, which had been boisterous all day, would have died down by then but the fresh wind persisted so I went for a walk instead.
It was a lovely evening as long as you could keep out of the wind. I chose a sheltered route and enjoyed my stroll a great deal.
I divided my attention between things that were close….
….things that were a bit further away…
….something that was quite far away…
…and some views.
It was a much better choice than battering into a strong wind on my bike and getting depressed.
Mrs Tootlepedal had had her tea and was back out in the garden trimming hedges when I got home.
In a vain effort to improve my brain power, I had fish cakes for tea. It hasn’t helped my typing. I could get the blog done in half the time of i didn’t have to correct eevry other wird.
The flying bird of the day is the jay seen from a distance……
…and I normally would have been quite happy to finish a post with it it but it is outshone today, in my view, by a relaxed greater spotted woodpecker.
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Among so many excellent photographs the ones that stood out for me were the woodpecker shots glad they posed so nicely.
So I’m not the only on has to correct avery other word!
I thknk your mystery flower may be a hypericum. (My typing’s not ususlly as accurate as his.)
Thnak you for the plant ID.
Great pictures, especially the woodpecker!
They are very attractive birds.
The Red Admiral was quite cooperative. Those do look like torches coming out of its head! Good to see the slow worms again, too. We don’t have those here.
96 degrees F here this afternoon. The real heat of summer started yesterday.
Too hot for me by a long way.
I was going to say hypericum or St. John’s wort for the unknown flower as well.
I couldn’t let a name like Melancholy thistle go by without knowing where it came from so I did some reading and found that it comes from the potion which was once made from it to cure melancholia. It’s an old time anti depressant.
I’m glad the Lumix is working again. It worked wonders on the flowers, the views and especially the woodpeckers.
I have heard it suggested that it is because there is a single flower on each stem so it is melancholy from lonliness but doubtless yours is the better suggestion. The Lumix did do well on the woodpeckers.
Nice woodpecker shots. 🙂
I like woodpeckers.
Excellent photos from the feeders, I feel sorry for the poor old Lumix!
It’s just trying to annoy me now.
Great shots of the woodpeckers and butterfly.
Flashy arty shot!
I agree.
I love how you get such great shots of birds and bees and other insects. some of them are stunning
The camera is the key and having plenty of bee attracting flowers helps a lot too.
A word of caution, don’t let the new Lumix near the old one, they will collaborate and both work and not work at the same time.
There are almost too many great images in this post, the flowers and the landscapes almost made me forget the great shots of the woodpeckers at the beginning of this post.
I will take you advice about the Lumixes.
More glorious bees!
So much fun to photos of birds that we don’t have in Maine. I must say, those “worms” looked an awful lot like snakes. And, yes, typos happen. Sigh.
The slow worms are legless lizards and quite harmless.
Legless lizards! I didn’t know such creatures existed. Thanks for the illumination.
Beautiful woodpecker photos. They are young Greater Spotteds as you no doubt already know and haven’t yet learnt to be scared of kindly bird watchers.
They certainly know how to squabble among themselves. I would get more pictures if they didn’t keep chasing each other off the feeders.