An unexpected pleasure of being on extended sick-leave

Hopefully you’ll have seen the pictures on Picasa already that I took in the snows of January 2010 of the birds in the garden. If not, here’s a slideshow for you to take a peek. Of the birds that have regularly visited the garden over the past few months the only ones missing from the photos are the Great Tit and Tree Sparrow – hope they survived the cold. The goldfinches seem to dominate the garden – we must be the only ones providing nyger seed (which they love). We had a wren earlier on in the autumn, and of course Jenny saw a sparrow hawk just before Christmas after it had attempted an attack on one of the feeders. Otherwise I think we’ve got everything “captured”.

Enjoy!

PS Peter asked how I did the posting of a slideshow on to my WordPress Blog. I used “vodpod” to do that; for posting a slideshow into Blogger/Blogspot it’s much easier. Picasaweb provides an “Embed slideshow” function on the rhs of the page and you can then just copy and paste the code into your blog post. Easy peasy.

Just in case you thought Rhiwbina was a bit boring …

My colleague Joe Nicholls and his wife popped into see us yesterday. They brought a bottle of Rioja for my birthday too, which will be much appreciated this evening! Anyway, whilst with us they shared with us the story of Nick Boing – a story I’d never heard of before. I’m not going to say any more … just go here, or here for the low down on a variation on the shaggy dog’s tail.