A New Year

It's the 8th of January already and I haven't had time to wish blog readers a Happy Xmas let alone Happy New Year, where does the time go!  So what's been happening lately in Normanby I hear you ask, so here's a little summary of the last few weeks.  In the garden on the 8th December the mild winter meant we had our earliest invasion of newts, they were everywhere and you couldn't step foot on the patio or lawn without a torch or you would step on them.  I worry about them now as the weather has turned much colder and the pond has been frozen quite a few times over the last ten days or so, I suppose they go back into hibernation and aren't daft enough to get trapped under the ice.  Our mild winter has also meant almost daily sightings of a Buff-tailed Bumblebee feeding on the Mahonia which is in full beautiful flower at the moment.  Perhaps the most fascinating feeding event I have observed was  the antics of a Robin catching and eating Caddis Fly larvae, I had seen it diving into the edge of the pond and then flying onto a neighbouring bench with pieces of twig, prising a grub out and discarding the debris in a neat pile.  I wonder how many times this behaviour has been seen before?  On the birding front we currently have a local flock of 32 Waxwings and we have had up to 50 Pied Wagtails feeding in the turf fields behind the garden.  The park is holding a sizeable flock of Redwings and a handful of Siskins but not a lot else to be honest.  Photographically we have both been playing about with new equipment, Ive got a new iPhone which is taking some quite good landscape shots and Wayne has just got a new digiscoping camera which he is experimenting with.  He has gone for the Panasonic GX8 with 20mm pancake lens but the jury is still out on whether it will be better than his old Canon S120 - here's the first images taken in the park with the iPhone all unprocessed straight off the phone

and these all digiscoped with the Panasonic GX8