Garden and Ramsey

Siskins, sparrowhawks and swans.

Monday 2nd February, 2015.

I have a problem with conversations.  After a phone call is over or a friend has departed, I have a tendency to hold a mental post-mortem.  I mull over all the things that would have been better left unsaid, all the things that could have been expressed better and all the things I intended to say but completely forgot to mention.  In this digital age - email and blog conversations have the same effect on me.  Last week I intended to record the arrival of the first siskin in the garden since summer ended . . . but only remembered too late.  She was a little female and arrived on her own last Monday.  We didn’t see her on Tuesday but on Wednesday she was back eating sunflower seeds  - with a male - and we have seen them on the feeder a few times since then.

I have also seen a less welcome bird - a sparrowhawk.   I thought I might have spotted a sparrowhawk flying across the garden a few times recently.  But I only saw it briefly in the distance and hoped that I had misidentified it and that it was just an innocuous mistle thrush.   Then it swooped past the kitchen  window on Thursday morning, flying between feeder and the house.  This time there was no doubt.  It didn’t touch the feeder but the little birds scattered in alarm and the hawk may have caught one which flew in the wrong direction.  I am not sure because it all happened so fast.

The sparrowhawk was back the next day.  I looked out of the window and noticed that there were no little birds on the feeder and then he (or probably she because I got a fleeting  impression of a brown back rather than grey) sped past.  One of the little birds must have been aware of the predator and sounded the alarm in good time.   The poor things are living dangerously.

Late on Thursday afternoon when it was almost dark, snow started falling quite seriously.  Earlier there had been a few wintry showers, but mainly rain with just a few flurries of wet snowflakes that melted almost before they hit the ground.  I tried to take a photo of the snowflakes falling but it was after 4-30 and was too dark to use a fast enough speed - so I had to be content with a whitish back lawn.  The camera did its best to “improve” the light - it was even gloomier in real life.  A couple of robins watched me taking the photos.  They were hopping around in the flower bed, probably wondering whether I had a treat for them.  They weren’t behaving in an aggressive manner - they must be pairing off in anticipation of spring.

By the next morning no trace of white remained.  In Ramsey, during our routine trip to the supermarket and library, I was reminded of a saying which is popular in many parts of the globe . . . “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes (and it will change).”  The only thing that didn’t change all day was the icy cold wind.  We started off in sunshine - but when we came out of the Co-op we saw dark clouds approaching from the west.  I only had time to take one photo before the first big raindrops started to fall.

We drove home through heavy rain but it had almost stopped as we turned in through our gate.  Then the sun came out again and I took this photo of the sky over Skyhill exactly 20 minutes after taking the photo in the car park.

There was a series of short heavy showers passing over the glen all afternoon.  I snuggled up in bed with a book.  The weather on Saturday wasn’t much better.  It was less wet but windier.  I did a bit of weeding before coming inside to thaw out my fingers.

By Sunday I was getting desperate. There is a lot of time for thinking in winter - and not much scope for photography.  I only had three “not very interesting” photos to illustrate the next post and wondered whether it was worth trying to find enough material for a post every week.  I tell myself that I keep blogging partly to keep a record that I can refer back to in future and partly so that I won’t feel guilty about not keeping in touch with friends and family more frequently.  They can always check the blog if they want to find out whether we are still “alive and well” . . .  and living in Glen Auldyn.  But I am not sure whether those are reasons or excuses. I get a lot of pleasure from words and digital photography - but I do need something to motivate me. And the target of preparing a post for the blog once a week is excellent motivation.  After I have got past the horror of the blank page, I really enjoy writing the posts and choosing the best (or least bad) photos from the week.

I went out to look for flowers.  There was very little apart from snowdrops.  I am probably the only person who thinks there is no such thing as too many snowdrops but I do love them.  I have two varieties.  In the past I have rather lazily just referred to them as the small snowdrops and the big ones.  The small ones were here before us and the big ones were given to me by a neighbour.  He probably told me the name but if he did, I promptly forgot it.  I noticed that one of the big ones had lost a petal and the green marking on the inner petals was visible.

I checked the images of snowdrops on the internet and decided that my “big ones” are probably Galanthus plicatus 'Florence Baker'.   Galanthus plicatus is known as the Crimean snowdrop.  I also discovered that snowdrops do not have petals - they have tepals.  When I read this, I thought that I might be going dyslexic but apparently tepal is a recognised  term used to identify “one of the outer parts of a flower (collectively the perianth)”.

Then I looked up the small snowdrops.  They must be Galanthus nivalis (milk flower of the snow).  I had always thought they were native to the British Isles but apparently that is a common misapprehension.  They are native to most of Europe, from Spain to as far east as the Ukraine, but they are only naturalised in Britain.  And contrary to earlier opinion they probably didn’t arrive with the Romans.  It is now thought that they were introduced much later, perhaps around the early sixteenth century. They flower later than the Galanthus plicatus and are much smaller as you can see from this clump in front of some of “the big ones”.  The buds on the nivalis are just starting to show white.

The only other flowers, or nearly flowers, that I found were these colourful buds on the Skimmia japonica rubella . . .

. . . and a few sweetly scented viburnum bodnantense flowers which were near the top of the large shrub - only accessible via zoom, so high that I couldn’t even catch a waft of the scent.

I took my camera with me again when I drove into Ramsey to get the Sunday newspaper, thinking that I might take some photos of the harbour and perhaps, if I was lucky, there might  be a couple of swans.  

The first thing I saw was a battalion of swans and mallard swimming downstream from the stone bridge towards the swing bridge.  They had air support from some gulls which were circling overhead.

The birds had been attracted by a happy little girl who was throwing bread into the water for the appreciative birds.

Brunch was obviously a serious business.  They were all trying to guess where the next bits of bread would land.

Most of the swans were mute swans.  I only know this because I checked the Manx Birdlife site and read that 27 mute swans had been reported in Ramsey Harbour towards the end of last year.

There was also a black swan - the first that I have seen in Ramsey.  I read that two have been seen in the harbour but I only saw one.  According to one of the birding sites they are not uncommon in the British Isles although they originate in Australia.  They were brought here as ornamental birds and some have escaped into the wild.

The black-headed gulls were also very interested in the free food.  They are still in winter plumage but the males will have distinctive dark brown heads during the breeding season.

After the feeding frenzy was over the mute swans and mallard returned upstream . . .

. . . three Canada geese which had joined the party swam off in the opposite direction . . .

. . . and I departed for home.  Just stopping once after turning off the main road into the glen to take a photo across the Auldyn River of the northern end of Skyhill.and to ponder on a last thought about swans.  The accepted meaning of Glen Auldyn is Glen of Mountain Streams but there is an alternative explanation.  It is said that the name is a corruption of an earlier name which dates back to the sixteenth century, Altadale.  And Altadale could be derived from an old Scandinavian name Alptardalr which means swan's glen.