One wallaby and plenty of weather.
Saturday 7th March 2015.
Last week ended, and the new month and the official start of spring began, with a cold, windy day.
I was out in the garden on Sunday morning doing a bit of pruning, after cutting back some wind damaged branches on the hawthorn and wild rose behind the house, when Tim called me to the phone. The call was from our neighbour . . . to let me know that there was a wallaby in their back garden. I grabbed my camera and ran up the steps to the patio above our garage. I couldn’t see the wallaby from the patio - so I ran through the house into our back garden and saw the wallaby on one of the terraces near the top of their garden. I managed to take four photos before it noticed me and hopped up the bank and disappeared into the plantation.
I have our neighbours’ cats, as well as our kind neighbour, to thank for this photo opportunity. Willow drew her owners’ attention to the intruder when she arrived in their kitchen in an agitated state and stared anxiously out of the window until they looked out to see what was bothering her. Rebel, her brother, was not so cautious and was observed rolling around on the grass not far from the wallaby. I think the wallaby must have been watching him when I took the first photos and this allowed me to get close to the garden wall before it spotted me. As soon as it looked in my direction it decided to leave.
A group of wallabies escaped from the Curraghs Wildlife Park (about 6 miles/10 kilometers from the glen) in the 1970's and have been living and breeding in the wild ever since. They were first spotted in Glen Auldyn a year or two ago. This is the second one I have seen in the glen.
Later we took a packet of left-over bread and went to Ramsey to buy the Sunday newspaper and feed the swans in the harbour. The swans did get a bit of the bread but the gulls, especially the herring gulls, got the lion’s share again. There were three jackdaws watching the action. They are the smallest of our local crows and kept a safe distance from the madding crowd.
The black headed gulls were there again. A few are starting to change from their winter plumage. This one has rather mottled - half way between two seasons - feathers on its head . . .
. . . while this one already has its full, very dark brown, summer head.
This group are mainly in winter plumage. The flapping bird is a juvenile. It still has some of the brown mottling on its wings.
We bought the newspaper and a shower of rain started as we walked back to the car. It seemed a good plan to enjoy a restful afternoon and conserve our energy for the week ahead.
On Monday morning I received an email from a friend in Baltimore with a photo - of icicles hanging from a telephone line outside her kitchen window. Looking out through our windows, I wondered whether snow would outscore icicles in a game of weather poker. Our forecast was for “sunny spells, strong and gusty westerly winds and just isolated wintry showers”. I had been planning to give the grass its first cut of the spring but one of the “isolated wintry showers” took its time passing over the glen. I scurried around opening windows - so that I could take photos - and closing them quickly to stop flurries of snow blowing in. It may have been the second day of spring but it didn’t look or feel like it.
When the rain and snow had nearly stopped falling, I went outside to take some more photos before the white stuff melted. All thoughts of mowing were abandoned.
Tuesday dawned bright and dry so the mowing, which had been pencilled in for Wednesday, was moved forward. I managed to finish in time to do the usual shopping trip to Ramsey just after lunch. There was a bitterly cold wind again, blowing down from the mountain. Although yesterday’s snow in the glen had disappeared almost as soon as the flurries stopped, we could see a fair amount of snow still clinging to the upper slopes of North Barrule.
Wednesday was a bit warmer and there were intimations of spring so I wandered round the garden on a flower hunt. I saw the first hoverfly of the year feeding on the viburnum tinus.
The first daffodil of the year was nearly open.
It should open fully tomorrow and I will declare the 5th of March to be the first day of spring 2015 in our garden. The mini-daffs opened a few days ago. They are always the earliest but they are too small to count as proper daffs.
The first buds are starting to open on the flowering currant too, and the new leaves are unfurling at the same time.
The crocuses haven’t been very happy this year. They haven’t had enough sun, have had too much wind, and have also suffered from the occasional battering by small hailstones during the “wintry showers”.
Most of the bulbs which survived the pheasant attack produce mauve flowers, like the one on the right (below). But I found one clump which was different. The outer ring of tepals are mauve on the inner side and white with mauve veining on the outer side. They must have hybridised because we haven’t had any like this in the past.
This year there are six buds on my most exotic looking bulbs, the veltheimia. They live in two large pots in the conservatory.
In the evening, Tim pointed out that the moon looked full. The Isle of Man is said to be one of the better places in the British Isles for star gazing - because of the low level of light pollution. I cannot tell one star from another but one of my ambitions is to get a good photo of the full moon. When the moon rises early in the evening, and the sky is still reasonably bright, the camera can cope on its auto setting but when the sky is dark the contrast between the sky and the moon is too great and I have to try manual settings. I battled for ages and this is the best that I managed. The moon will only be truly full on Thursday but cloudy skies are forecast so there will be no chance of moon photography.
The photo on the left was taken shortly after half past eight on Wednesday night and the one on the right was taken at ten to five in the evening eight days earlier. What I really want is a full moon in the early evening when there is enough light to show the shadows in the craters. I shall have to be patient - and to practice using the manual settings on the camera.
On Thursday morning we walked up through Brookdale plantation. It was our first walk of the week. After deciding to have a day of rest on Sunday, we found one excuse after another to put off walking. It was a grey morning but warmer than recent days. The temperature may even get up to 10 degrees - the first double figures for a while. We took a short detour in search of a place where we could see our house in its setting below the wooded slope of Skyhill.
Then we stopped to nibble a leaf of wall pennywort (aka navelwort) which was growing on one of the old dry stone farm walls that predate the plantation by many years. I didn’t realise that wall pennywort was edible until we saw a TV presenter eating a leaf during a progamme about pilgrims in Wales on Sunday. The verdict is that it didn’t taste very interesting but it wasn’t unpleasant. It certainly tasted better than scurvygrass although it may not have as high a vitamin C content.
And that was the last photograph of the week. We had ambitious plans for Friday - another walk in Brookdale but this time all the way up to the top gate. But after staggering up Parliament Street to the fish shop in a blustery south westerly gale we decided that a quiet afternoon in a warm house would be a better idea.
The wind is just as strong today with “Gales, perhaps occasionally severe gales” forecast for the Irish Sea. The average wind speed in Ramsey has touched 40 knots (46 mph) a couple of times and the gusts are much stronger. I have managed to do a couple of sessions of turf-cutting for the new path project but photography isn’t possible. It is hard enough to stay upright in some of the gusts and holding a camera steady is out of the question.
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