Rojer's blog: May!

Friday May the First

No walkies today but here's the Moon at half past seven o' the evening …

… and a vid of it from my back door

Not quite up to cinema standard

Saturday the second of May 2020

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

Byron

(apart from it's a 'he' and he's swimming not walking)

A couple of cootlets looking for mum and dad

Mum on the nest

Red campion among the undergrowth

This is a growth on a willow tree.
It was just a grey lump over winter and has sprouted deformed leaves with spring

Horses grazing across the river the field was partly under water in Novenmber

Mowing the wicket
(a number of 'travellers' have moved on to the cricket field in the last couple of days)

Columbines in my back garden

Didn't know that they were columbines until I put a picture on twitter.

Aquilegia vulgaris
common columbine
Aquilegia vulgaris, the wild species is usually blue, with nodding "bonnets", but many purple, mauve, pink and white colour variants have developed in gardens during its long history in cultivation

BUT

There's another aquilegia which I'd never heard of:

Aquilegia 'Bunting' (Songbird Series)
columbine 'Bunting'
'Bunting' is a perennial with grey-green, divided foliage and flowers with spreading pale blue sepals and white petals with blue spurs

Got to find some of that!
(if you don't know why: my surname's "Bunting")

Lots of brids drink at my garden bucket
The house sparrow is an opportunistic bird of towns and cities, parks, gardens and farmland. House sparrows feed on a variety of foods, including buds, grains, nuts and scraps, and will visit birdtables and feeders. They live in colonies and nest in holes or crevices in buildings, among Ivy or other bushes, and in nestboxes; they use a variety of materials to make their nests. Both parents will incubate the three to five eggs and raise the young. House sparrows are residents in the UK, but may disperse from their breeding grounds to feed on nearby farmland and grassland in winter.

(From here)

The sparrows that I see in my garden seem to mainly live in ivy growing on the canal walls

Another moon pic: this one's at half past twelve in the night of the second/third of May

Thursday the Fourteenth of November Twenty-Nineteen

Fungi growing in wood chippings under the birch trees

Pondorama

Saturday the sixteenth of November Twenty-Nineteen

Much underrated birds
(IMHO)
There are 200 million of these birds on the (American) continent, and they can be found as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico.

On March 6, 1890, a New York pharmaceutical manufacturer name Eugene Schieffelin brought natural disaster into the heart of (America) completely without meaning to. Through the morning snow, which congealed at times to sleet, sixty starlings, imported at great expense from Europe, accompanied Schieffelin on the ride from his country house into Central Park—the noisy, dirty fulfillment of his plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare into North America. Schieffelin loved Shakespeare and he loved birds….The American Acclimatization Society, to which he belonged, had released other avian species found in Shakespeare—the nightingales and skylarks more commonly mentioned in his plays and poems—but none had survived. There was no reason to believe that starlings would fare any better. Schieffelin opened the cages and released the birds into the new world, without the smallest notion of what he was unleashing.

(From here)

Sparrows

Lichen
(I like lichen)

Jew's ear fungus
I've told elsewhere why it's called "Jew's" but this picture shows why the "ear" is appropriate. Apparently edible but I've never tried it.