Happily Ever After

Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running

Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.

An Airborne Mystery

by admin - 23:00 on 03 January 2011

That's Christmas officially over for another year – the baubles, tinsel and sparkly reindeer are back in the outhouse, the cards down and the tree left to begin its long decomposition at the bottom of the garden.

Closer to The Rural Retreat, Black Isle bird life continues to enjoy free seed, peanuts and fat balls. Blue, coal and great tits, chaffinches, greenfinches, robins, siskins, dunnocks, tree sparrows, house sparrows, yellowhammers, blackbirds, wood pigeons, pheasants, great spotted woodpeckers, collared doves, starlings and, briefly, a sparrowhawk have been seen recently. Owls have been heard.

And this morning, for the first time (by me, anyway) a mistle thrush was glimpsed, and a couple of unidentified SBJs. That's small brown jobs. They were around half or two-thirds the size of tree sparrows and similarly coloured except for a line of cream on their wings and a suggestion of red on the head, although that may have been my imagination.

"So where are the snaps to aid identification?" I hear you ask. Unfortunately the Pentax wasn't handy and they didn't hang around. I'll keep watch, then probably discover they're sparrows after all.

I really must get a bird book with better illustrations.

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