A Christmas present from Libby gave me the opportunity to experiment! The gift was a carved head bird feeder, as we have lots of feeders I decided to convert it into a bird box. It will be interesting to see if our feathered friends will use it this year.

Our latest bird ringing session led to the capture of this handsome chap, a very fine looking male Sparrow hawk.

When you see the talons up close you can see how they are such good killers!

My latest project is to clean, repair and relocate 35 of my 100 bird boxes. Nesting season is fast approaching so it needs to be done in the next week.

Some of the issues that I have had to deal with:-

I also was the recipient of 30 new bird boxes, thank you to Caroline for helping organise this donation.

These will be located in our new section of the reserve, hopefully our feathered friends will approve. This brings our site bird box total to 135.

Here are some of the feathered visitors caught on camera so far this year:-

Well the little bit of sun and a dry day has brought out the frogs on the bog. Woggle water pond was awash with our croaking little friends, so I am expecting a bumper crop of frog spawn this year!

Best play the video on full volume, then tune in to the frogs chorus.

My fencer finished off our fence, at the bottom of Dunces field, late on Sunday afternoon. I arrived on Monday morning to find this:-

A very large chunk of oak tree smack bank on top of my fence. I had not even paid for it and it’s trashed😡.

Lots of branches down elsewhere and the odd tree affected.

The good news was there was no damage to the hides or classroom, hurrah!

Big thanks to the Northumberland Railway Walks Society for the help provided this week with our hedge planting project. Over two days they managed to plant over 500 hedge plants.

They braved wind, snow and rain, so respect for their perseverance.

Thanks to Jennifer for organising the society groups and Libby for organising the planting on the days.

I had a call from my next door neighbour yesterday to say there was a cygnet in their back garden. I went and had a look and there was one of my cygnets strolling around in the back garden. The main pond is frozen solid at the moment and all the swans and cygnets had departed (temporarily I hope), this one had not gone far.

The problem was that the neighbours have a dog and several chickens so not ideal for them to have this trespasser. The next day I tried to walk it back to the reserve but she was not cooperating. Plan B was this:-

Fortunately she was very happy to be carried😀. It’s amazing how heavy a cygnet gets once you’ve carried it for a few hundred metres!

She seemed happy to see her pond (once I’d broken the ice and given her some food).

Leaving the site yesterday I encountered a very cute but deadly visitor. It was doing a very thorough search of the log piles obviously looking for its evening meal. A weasel on patrol.

Despite there being two chances I did not find the pot of gold☹️