Wild weather

Last week the weather was wild here although the sun shone. Barney and I ventured onto the common, me with a woolly hat and him with his ears blown upright. The hawthorn berries were bright red and shone like jewels on their stiff twigs, breakfast for hungry blackbirds in the weeks to come. High in the sky a heron was struggling to make progress, but the wind blew him about. He looked like a kite without a string. Eventually he gave up, landed and perched near the fence in a grumpy manner, looking cold and fed up. Barney is so slow now, joints painful but still positive about exploring rabbit holes....

Owls

Three years ago we had two baby tawny owls in the garden. They stayed awake all day like toddlers who wouldn't go to sleep and their parents must have been exhausted. As they got bigger they hopped about in the upper branches of the willow tree and if I walked underneath  and looked up, there they would be looking down at me in astonishment. It was a magical summer that year but sadly it has never happened again even though we have a perfect owl box set at just the right angle in the pear tree. Recently Jo asked me if I had found the owls in the cathedral and showed me where they were. So here they are, identical twins, who have watched the congregation from high on a pillar for centuries.