bunn

A female blackbird came and sat on my new special calciworm feeder and ate four calciworms!

I was previously unsure if the blackbirds were actually using the calciworm feeder or if it was just being looted by the jackdaws, but now I have seen it being used by the designated audience!

Not that I object to the jackdaws, but they really will eat pretty much anything.

At first, she flew joyfully after them
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Randomly we went to Rame Head: a long tall bulge of land pointing out into the sea.

 It has a little building on it that from a distance looks like a chapel.  Wikipedia calls it an 'intact shell' and says it is dedicated to St Michael, but at close quarters, it is fairly clear that the people who are mostly using it nowadays are equine.  Possibly they still say horsy prayers to St Michael for providing them with a horse-shelter with such fine views.
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I was looking out over the valley one morning this week, when I heard a huge sound. Not a very loud sound, but the sort of noise that is only made by quite large things. I thought at first it was a train, and then I realised that the nearest station is too far away. It sounded like the train was going past on the track that would once have run across the hillside above our house but that line was closed in the 1960s. Ghost Train!

Then I looked up and realised that the noise was made by an enormous cloud of tiny birds passing overhead, a really huge flock that stretched right across the entire village. Before I could do anything sensible like get some binoculars to try to see what sort of birds they were, they had flown off up the valley and disappeared.

In other news, I offered my visiting butterfly a piece of tissue that I had soaked and rinsed in clean water, then added a few drops of orange juice and a little fructose. She ignored it for a couple of days, but today she is sitting on it with her proboscis poked into the soggy tissue, so I assume my offering has been accepted. There are a few nectar plants in flower in the garden, but I'm guessing she's probably happier indoors until the weather is warmer. She appears to only have four legs, and looking into this, I discover that the Tortoiseshell is one of the Four Footed butterflies, which have reduced forelimbs that are kept tucked up out of the way. I've never noticed that before, even though the garden is often full of tortoiseshells...

Phonecall from my mother to say that she has had a rook with a damaged wing stuck in her back garden for several days, and will I come over and help her catch it so she can take it to the vet as despite being fed and watered and given a perch to sit on, it does not seem to be improving. 

Rooks are Beyond My Expertise, so any tips on rookwrangling would be much appreciated. 

Is it a cormorant or shag, a-searching for a paper bag?
Is it a large mis-shapen duck?
(I did not hear it quack, or cluck)

Or is it something strange and new 
to stop the visitors getting bored
placed there in secret, by canoe
to lure the twitchers in their hordes? 



It's a pity that I was carrying the Nex 3 camera when I saw this rather than my old compact superzoom: the 18-55mm lens has not done a bad job, but can't really get all that close.

I have been looking at zoom lenses. Ideally I'd like the E mount 18-200mm, but I really can't justify £630 on a lens, so I'm thinking I might see if I can get a second hand older manual focus lens and an adaptor - the NEX3 can connect to pretty much any manufacturers lens as long as it doesnt' have to autofocus, so that might be interesting (and cheap) to try for this sort of thing.