Category Archives: Kingswood

Should I follow in the footsteps of Noah?

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Garden Bunny
The most fearless wild rabbit I have ever come across!

The last few days have seen rain, and more rain. The field was totally flooded. The field pond went from empty to full in the course of a couple of days. The leaking garden pond is almost full. Not seen such high levels for years. This rain has added to a water main leaking outside one of our neighbours since at least March. I did wonder why one of our field gateways had been damp during the summer. The water apparently flowed to her ménage, which is well drained, and then through the ménage land-drains to the gateway. Thankfully Thames Water have at last fixed the leak. This though is worthy of its own story.

The rain has again attracted the Little Egret, and flocks of gulls, who suddenly descend on the field as if it were the seashore. If I wanted a house by the sea I would not have bought a house which is probably as far away from the coast as you can get in the UK. Not only do we have these coastal birds visiting us, we now have Garden Bunny. Such a fearless animal sitting eating our grass for most of the day, totally ignoring us as we walk around the house & garden, and the tractor which came into the garden to cut the hedges. One worry is that Rosemary saw some baby bunnies the other day.

Another one bites the dust

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Kestrel

This Kestrel has been spotted 9 times feeding from our feeder. How many more birds it has taken without us seeing is anyone’s guess. It is so pretty, but so our are finches and blue tits! Nature is arguably cruel, and I suppose they have to feed, as we similarily eat those pretty lambs I took pictures of at the beginning of lockdown. Shame I can’t quite read the number on his ring.

Little Egret

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The recent torrential rain has ended summer and attracted a Little Egret. The Little Egret could be seen wading around the field pulling up worms for breakfast. The Little Egret was large, so we thought we were lucky and had a Great Egret. Alas, beak, legs and feet show it to be a Little Egret, a far more common variety.

Wildlife

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Garden Life

Life can be tough. This year we have seen masses of Goldfinch, at the same time there have been Magpies, Sparrowhawks and Kestrels, all feeding on the smaller birds. Most days there are piles of feathers around the garden and field where some bird has met its maker. While this Kestrel was feeding, the Goldfinch were still at their Niger seed.

Comet NEOWISE

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Cloudless evening on Monday so I attempted to photograph NEOWISE. The problem I had was with my knowledge of the camera. I didn’t know where infinity was on the lens scale. Should it be hard up against the stop, on the infinity mark or some other position? Does it change with different zoom? During daylight this morning I discovered it was significantly different, more on the 300-meter distance, and does change with focal lengths. It is difficult to focus through the viewfinder when there is just black. No help from the moon to act as a focusing aid, because it was a new moon. So alas my pictures could be sharper. Possibly I should have tried focusing on the planets of Jupiter and Saturn which were very bright, close together and towards the South East.

The first photograph, where you can see the trees, was taken on my mobile phone. With a little imagination, you can see the comet trail point directly upwards. The second photograph was taken with the DSLR, zoomed and cropped to the comet.

The tail of the comet was just visible with the naked eye, but only if you knew where to look and had spotted it with binoculars. I was looking after 11 pm. Any earlier and the sky was too bright, leave it later and I believe the comet was nearer the horizon. When we saw the comet, it was towards the North West, halfway between the horizon and star called Dubhe in The Plough constellation. Dubhe is one of two pointer stars used to locate Polaris.

R and I had made a previous attempt by getting up at 3.30 in the morning, alas it was cloudy on the horizon, we looked in the wrong direction, and it was getting very bright at that time of the morning. Excellent view of Venus, it is now viewable in the morning.