Swift Half update - 17th July 2011

• After a warm, settled, sultry week - the weekend has produced windy, blustery, squally, cool weather, but the garden has survived!
• Our tallest sunflower now approaches 9 feet and is still trying to fully produce its flower.
• Our sage has been pretty-well uprooted by the hens, but still survives.
• My pulmonaria has started its second growth of the year.
• Our first two water lily flowers have burst out of the pond, with maybe three to come still...
• The moth trap has bagged a lovely magpie moth (very under-rated I think) and a ruby tiger - and plenty of scalloped oaks and buff ermines.
• The honeysuckle and lavender have started to flower again.
• Malu has raided another blackbird's nest in the back garden - giving two three-day old chicks to the hens to eat and ending our blackbird's second try this year.
• Finally  - a first for the garden at Swift Half - I photographed a brown argus butterfly this morning, roosting on a dead chive flower at dawn.

Swift Half update - 3rd October 2010

• Not a wonderful weekend's weather with my flood warning map showing red all over the place and more rain to come in the week ahead, yet in the brief bit of sun today I managed to see a late migrant hawker dragonfly patrolling the garden still...


• I haven't managed to get out to take any decent shots this weekend, due to the rain and a troublesome cough, which is a shame, because the squally weather is producing some dramatic skyscapes.


• Its not often though, one can say within 3 miles of one of the biggest towns in the south of England, in a built up area and in pretty dodgy weather, one can sit outside with a coffee (or lemon and whisky in my case today) and watch a red kite and a peregrine pass over the garden - in ten minutes!


• Well, the kites are well documented round 'ere. If you want to see properly wild kites -you can go to Gigrin farm in Wales, where they attract several hundred every day for paying photographers, by chucking bait around - or you can come to the M40 by Watlington (and south), where the kites aren't baited but are omnipresent anyway.


• The peregrines are less well known. I am lucky in that I've been recording peregrines in and around Reading for a couple of years now, after stumbling across one scaring the bejaysus out of the woodpigeons in a town centre tiny park (well, football pitch really) in 2007, right behind our terraced house. (It took me about a month of sightings for me to believe my own eyes!)


• We have five (I think) peregrines around this part of Berkshire - very often (as you'll see I've posted on before) one roosts on a building opposite Reading station - there's no doubt about it, peregrines are a real success story in the UK these days and can be seen in many, many town and city (with a cathedral or large tower block to roost on) centres.


• The shots of the peregrine accompanying this post are pretty poor admittedly - the bird was very high up. The third shot above was taken at 7x optical zoom and its still only a dot in the sky - the first two shots have been cropped severely so you can see the bird better!After 30 odd years of peering at birds and animals at distance, including birds of prey, I tend to spot something like this, pretty early, at distance and I am very lucky my eyesight still allows me to do so, at present! The peregrine over our garden this afternoon was a juvenile - one can tell that by the fact that its breast is vertically-streaked rather than horizontally-barred.