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n away i would not recommend going full screen on this next one unless you are either a naturalist somebody who likes to take their clothes of outdoors when al isn t there or if you just want to get back on your children and gross them out a bit for what parenthood involves well that video tells me that the chicks are being well fed and neither adult is shirking from their parental duties the yard is full of swallows with little white packages in their beaks looking for suitable targets i presume and that will probably be the first sign that we see of the house martins hatching for now the martins are still frantically gathering mud building extensions and brightening up nurseries it is not just our pair that are late they all seem to be barn swallow delichon urbica erithacus rubecula european robin garden birds hirundo rustica house martin nature wildlife plantae germander speedwell june 13 2015 fodrambler 27 comments a little bit of flowery stuff there are quite a few different speedwells about just now and telling one from another can seem a bit daunting the little blue flowers of different species can look very similar one day i will write a post about all the different types that i know and point out the differences that will be a long post today i am just going to write about the germander speedwell veronica chamaedrys fortunately germander speedwell has a unique identifiable feature that separates it from all of the others and we will get to that in a bit first the flower germander has multiple flowers growing from a single main flower stem on their own little stalks this kind of arrangement is called a raceme and it helps to separate germander from say persian speedwell that just has one flower on each flower stem germander speedwell persian speedwell veronica persica quite a few speedwells flower on racemes so that alone isn t enough for a positive id but it helps i usually look at the leaves first they are a good indication of species as many of the speedwells have quite distinctive leaves in the case of the germander they grow in opposite pairs i suppose that i could tell you that the leaves are in opposite pairs triangular and crenate sessile or with short petioles etc etc wikiwotsit but i don t think that kind of gobbledegook helps anybody they simply look like this now we come to the unique identifiable feature germander speedwell has two lines of hairs on opposite sides of the main stem it is the only one of our speedwells that has this feature and is is quite easy to see with the naked eye it is only the main stem that has these two distinct lines of hairs the flower stems have hairs all around them but if the main stem has this feature and the flowers and leaves fit then you have found a germander speedwell and nothing else i like it when flowers can be this positive about their own identity it makes life easy blue wildflowers germander speedwell nature veronica chamaedrys wildflowers animalia i voted little thumbs up icon june 11 2015 fodrambler 34 comments well this time i had something important to vote for and i did know that my vote would be counted fifty five years ago in nineteen hundred and sixty we had a vote to determine britain s national bird some people are trying to pretend that didn t count but it did this year we had a new vote to elect our first ever national bird i voted back in march the polls closed on may 7th and today they announced the winner i won that is not really what this post is about there is a hole where my robin used to be i am surrounded by beautiful birds i am like the hugh hefner of gloucestershire in an ornithological kind of way they don t have to wear bunny suits but it is not enough i miss him now i don t think that i have picked up many new readers since starting this blog and so you will already know what i am talking about but just in case last december i noticed that every time i opened my door there was a robin outside singing his little heart out i thought to myself i could tame this bird and i did it took me three months by march it was eating out of my hand but it wasn t just that the bird knew me it would wait outside of my door for me to get up in the morning and as soon as i opened my door it would bounce onto that green hand rail it sang to me all of the time it was my friend like fizz is my friend and not like any other bird that i had ever met around about now fizz was starting to get a bit funny she was keen to point out that eating out of my hand wasn t a proper trick anyone can do eating just when everything was going perfectly the bird disappeared i don t know why but it was probably related to the season there is a hole where my bird used to be and the swallows and martins can t fill it this post is marking the day that i started again there is no robin outside of my door this time and so it might take a little longer i have bought a little feeder and hung it just outside of my door behind the feeder that green mess is a grape vine i see wrens dunnocks mice and sometimes goldcrests there i want robins i have to bring them back into this area there are plenty in the back garden i don t always get what i want but i try i have the patience of the hunter watch this space also i am absolutely with the little children on this one if you cannot have what you want at first then you should kick and scream and hold your breath until your face turns blue we only live once and second best isn t good enough if you are determined and focused then you will achieve your goals i think these days i have quite little goals i already did the bigger ones corruption democracy erithacus rubecula garden birds national bird nature robin wildlife fizz buttercup s end june 11 2015 fodrambler 31 comments yesterday they started cutting the fields don t be sad it is part of the natural cycle of the farm they are just coppicing the buttercups the buttercups will grow back bigger and stronger than ever before but they won t look like this again until next may coppicing them now allows light to reach the floor and it starts a whole new spurt of growth with different flowers that wouldn t otherwise stand much chance those fields were full of all kinds of wildflowers not just buttercups there were clovers and speedwells dandelions dock and all sorts of grasses and now they are going to feed animals i am glad that they are using the fields in this way it is much more interesting than just grazing them all year round these fields will be allowed to grow again and they will be cut again in the late summer and by then they will look just as full as they did yesterday with a whole different selection of flowers clover will fill them for a while that is another beautiful thing to see for now though fizz and i had the big responsibility of enjoying every minute of the day and we tried really hard to do just that she is what they call a companion animal but that is just another way of saying toy dog i consider myself to be young at heart some people say in his second childhood that is not so kind but i suppose it amounts to the same thing young people think their marbles are so important but once you have lost them you forget that you ever had them and anyway they just hold you back young at heart knows exactly what toys are for i used a little dog there to illustrate the extraordinary beauty of the fields as they were last week did you see how i did that i did take a few photographs of a serious botanical nature but they are for elsewhere mostly we just played second childhood oh yes bring it on fizz and i have a new habitat to explore today as we struggle on with our serious botanical research one where we won t keep losing our ball i will let fizz have the last word buttercups common sorrel companion animal farming nature second cildhood silage wildflowers animalia misumena vatia it s spiders june 10 2015 fodrambler 31 comments aaargth it s another white one this spider is driving me nuts this is misumena vatia in britain we call it the crab spider but in north america where the goldenrod grows it is known as the goldenrod spider or simply the flower spider this spider is an ambush predator it hides on flower heads and waits for it s prey to arrive it has the ability to change colour to match the flower it is hiding on and they do come in beautiful golden yellow all i ever find is white ones well they can t do pink obviously the closest that i have ever come to a golden spider was in may of last year this one does look a little bit jaundiced i have tried taking them and placing them on a yellow flower but they don t change colour for me they just run away i suppose the thing to do would be to get myself a nice yellow pot plant and keep it in a cage on my windowsill and then add spiders i am probably going to do that next i don t feel qualified to write about misumena vatia without being able to show it s amazing colour changing abilities yesterday i found a white one it wanted to embrace me and i thought well why not so i offered it the hand of friendship i sympathise with everybody who has a fear of spiders it isn t an irrational fear it is a very sensible fear all over the world there are spiders that can give you a very painful bite and some that can kill you everybody should have an instinctive fear of spiders a lot of people in britain have this same fear so i think that it must be imprinted within us from birth some primitive memory passed on genetically there are no dangerous spiders in britain very very few have strong enough mouth parts to even pierce human skin the natural history museum has a short list of those that can if you want to worry about it uk spider bites this beautiful lady won t bite me this one is a female the males are tiny only about 5mm across and that is another challenge for me find a male spider anyway i can t pinch this one it wouldn t have been the hand of friendship if i intended to abduct the creature it would have been a trick i will put it back now anyway i haven t got my yellow flower yet take care little animal arachnida crab spider flower spider goldenrod spider misumena vatia nature wildlife animalia squabbling martins june 9 2015 fodrambler 19 comments this is just going to be a quick post about the martins fizz and i are spending most of our time out in the fields because all around us the fields are being cut now and we just want to enjoy the long grass and wildflowers while we have them i will post about that in a bit there isn t a great deal going on in the martins nest but there are some funny things happening that i want to put on record most of the time it is like this there is normally at least one bird in the nest and a lot of coming and going i am guessing that they have got eggs but none hatched yet i don t know how easy it will be to follow what is going on when they do hatch because unlike the swallows this all happens indoors i am expecting the chicks to become impatient as they get older and start putting their heads out looking for mum and dad s return we will see there is something strange going on something that i don t understand yet at this stage i would expect them to be paired up nest established eggs laid the swallows have got hatchlings they should all pretty much know what s going on and how things are going to pan out this summer there is quite a lot of squabbling going on around the nest i have had to slow this video right down to be clear about what is happening here there are three birds involved and one of them is being pulled out of the nest by the nose i have seen this sort of action at least three times already but only caught it on film once house martins are social birds and normally nest in small colonies of at least four or five nests this is the only nest on this side of the house but there are martins all around the farm and not very far away they should get on well together if anyone knows what is going on then please feel free to comment i think that i heard the words you hussy being cheeped but i lost the sound when i slowed down the video birds delichon urbica house martin nature nesting wildlife animalia rosa s secret june 7 2015 fodrambler 29 comments i spent a good part of my day today filming the martins not a lot is happening one bird is staying in the nest a lot and i think they have eggs but no evidence of new life yet much as i want to watch the martins this year it is very hard to ignore the other beautiful birds that are nesting just below barn swallows mate for life and they return to their old nests sometimes i am just going to believe that these are the same birds that left here last september the birds that gave me so much enjoyment last year so here is a quick recap of what happened last year fred and rosa had three broods the first was five birds and i watched and filmed them grow in the nest i was able to watch them take their first flights and then they were gone the second brood was not so successful they all died and rosa was distraught there was a call that she had made when she was encouraging her chicks to take their first flight calling her babies to her i had previously only heard this on the day that they fledged but now it became her constant lament it went on for about two weeks and she just cried all of the time there was a problem i had picked up two dead chicks from under the nest and removed them it soon became apparent from the smell that there was at least one more still in the nest that she couldn t throw out the nest was uninhabitable they went to work and they built a new nest on the opposite side of the passage rosa had her third brood and it was just one chick i don t know if this was the right thing to do but she was happy again and it was so nice to see her happy and not to have to listen to her constant wailing i think that fred was relieved too the problem with a third brood is that even the second brood has a hard time with the migration they have less time to prepare than the first brood her single chick fledged and that was in september and they all left just days after he had learned to fly i have since learned that not all of the swallows go all of the way to south africa the rspb report that a significant minority overwinter in southern europe so maybe he made it we will never know she s back and unlike the martins she has got something in her nest it is too little to see yet the first bird that you see on the nest is the female that is rosa the second bird is fred the white sac that fred removes from the nest is the evidence that they have at least one egg hatched who s a clever girl then you should really watch this next video full screen just to see rosa s reaction to her hatchling fred however is not so perfect the birds separate during the migration and in rosa s absence fred has picked up a little something i don t think rosa has noticed yet again go full screen to see what is running around on fred s back most birds suffer from some sort ...