A blast from the past..

I received these images this week taken by our friend John Petyt back in 1985 - the first is of a set of bones painstakingly taken from pellets by my husband Wayne.  From memory Wayne thinks he collected them from Ashbyville and the host so to speak was a Great Grey Shrike pellet(s) The second photo is of Wayne himself at his then second home Ashbyville.  Back to the present time still plenty of Waxwings in the Scunthorpe area with 50+ on Brigg Road this morning and then influx of the day seems to be Fieldfares - they are everywhere including our garden, my brothers garden and my parents garden - all fiercely guarding apples put out for the Blackbirds.

Garden birds .....

No prizes for guessing what we have done on this cold snowy day!
Yes absolutely nothing except keep warm and watch the garden and it was worth it as we had a new garden tick - a Kestrel flew into the silver birch and fixed his stare on something in the paddock before swooping down. It was the second raptor of the day as earlier a female Sparrowhawk had terrorised our happy flock of diners. In total today the following 21 species have been recorded in our garden; 1 Redpoll, 1 Treecreeper, 1 Mistle Thrush, 1 Great Spotted Woodpecker, 3 Robins, 8 Blue Tit, 9 Great Tit, 1 Coal Tit, 3 Dunnock. 5 Chaffinch, 4 Wood Pigeon, 2 Jackdaw, 1 Nuthatch, 14 Blackbird (new garden record) 1 Magpie, 1 Jay, 1 Collared Dove, 1 House Sparrow and finally a late Moorhen. I'm still practising on the iPad and indeed this post has been written and published using the blogger app and the photos below both taken with the iPad, which proves that although the iPad has a great screen it has a not so good camera!

Not snow but foggy frosty

The Park is beautiful today as a result of the freezing fog conditions of yesterday not so good for birds though with the fishing lake frozen my Kingfisher and Goosander have gone else where.  The landscape will change again tomorrow with lots of snow predicted so no-doubt I’ll be back in the Park  taking more snowy shots.

A little snow in the Park....

..unless you listen to the British media who would like to convince us that we are in the grip of an arctic winter (again!. No sign of the Kingfisher or Goosander but a nice flock of 24 Fieldfares and both Greater Spotted and Green Woodpeckers were vocal this morning.

Unhappy Peacocks..

Peru - Amazon to the Andes

This post is nothing more than a test as I received an iPad mini for Xmas and it has taken me all this time to get use to the ways of Apple being solely a windows kind of girl. However having managed to download some images it occurred to me that these images of Peru escaped the original post so I could practise with them!