nineveh_uk

Over the years I have lived in this house, red kites have become a more and more familiar site from the kitchen window. However I was quite surprised recently when I walked to the park with the Merlin app and it registered the call of a buzzard. It did sound quite like a buzzard, but while they are around outside the city, I'd never seen them in so locally before. I mistrusted the app.

I should not have done. Last week, as my parents were repaying my hospitality by doing the front garden*, the birds were singing loudly in the trees with the usual goldfinches etc, and I, acting as foreman, thought I'd see what was making that other sound, which was a bit red kite-ish but not quite, and got buzzard again. And then we saw it sitting in the flowering cherry above us. A youngish one, presumably a yearling, and very obviously a buzzard. It hung around for quite a while, hopped between trees a couple of times, and then flew off, to the great relief of everything else around. So that was more exciting garden wildlife than usual. I haven't seen it again, but will be looking out.

More routinely, further buzzards were seen on Tuesday when I drove up to Leamington Spa for my private Covid jab. This turned out to be Pfeizer rather than Novavax, as the logistics were still being sorted, but I was happy with anything, and it did mean I got the latest one. Then lunch with uncle and aunt, before driving home. I was pleased to have a good Tuesday and feel rather fitter than I have been recently, because I spent Weds and Thurs absolutely pole-axed by exhaustion as a jab side-effect, but it's now gone so all in all that went pretty well.

And now it is April and the weather is warmer and I am spending this weekend enjoying that and relaxing. Starting with a late breakfast of waffles. Nineveh's waffle-making tip: if you like cardamom, add a pinch to the batter. It really works.

* Actually, this is more like my providing them with entertainment. Dad clearly feels that doing jobs for me when they visit allows him to think that he is still relatively young and fit** (in his late seventies), and the only pleasure Mum enjoys more than telling someone what to do with their garden***, is going to a garden centre, which we did on Saturday morning.

** Alas, not quite sufficiently so to paint the interior of the house for me, but you can't have everything.

*** She literally still had her coat on when they arrived late afternoon the Sunday before Easter and she stood in the window and said, "What I suggest you do is...". Monday, she started doing it.

I watched the first episode of Wild Isles, David Attenborough's latest, this week and very good it was too. In brief:

(1) Excellent as Attenborough's voiceovers always are, a programme entitled Wild Isles really ought to be narrated by someone with a West Midlands accent.

(2) Youngest Sister and I have long thought that the herring gull deserves a proper wildlife documentary. Despite its sometimes-seeming ubiquity, particularly at 5am in a seaside bedroom with single glazing, they're on the conservation Red list, and they are, when not attempting to steal chips, impressive birds. They deserve their moment in the spotlight. Alas, that came as the baddies vs the cuter puffin.

(3) Every wildlife documentary I have seen or similar story I have read that features orcas/killer whales in recent years seems to include a story about how the particular pod the camera team is following has learned to hunt its prey in a unique manner. Since orcas are highly intelligent predators, that is perhaps not surprising once they are closely studied. Still, I think this was about the forth pod in a row. One day the "something uniquely them" about a particular family is going to be that they've developed tool use, creating blow darts out of carefully-splintered seal ribs that they coat with Portuguese man o' war venom and have used in combination with their more common practice of drowning the prey once captured to take control of a nuclear submarine, the sort equipped with ballistic missiles, and the captain is urgently conveying their demands.

The ospreys are back at the Loch of the Lowes webcam. Watch them from a far more comfortable setting than they enjoy via the webcam:



Highlights via the blog.

In fairness, if mobile phones with cameras had existed when I walked to school, and I had seen a giant salamander, I would certainly have recorded it*.



I am feeling a bit cheesed off, having come down with a cold just at the point at which I saw light at the end of the tunnel on a couple of work fronts. I cracked and went home for the afternoon in the hope that a rest might head it off a bit. We shall see.

*Technology outstrips language. This sentence originally read, "In fairness, if mobile phones with video cameras had existed when I walked to school, and I had seen a giant salamander, I would certainly have filmed it."

This morning was brightened by video of a Swiss pine marten invading a football pitch. It is eventually caught and removed.

A man with the speed and skill to grab a pine marten and who clings on even after being bitten by it, is a man I’d want on my team. It was eventually caught a second time and removed by a gloved goalkeeper.