This big patch of daffs is coming into flower rather later than many others in the vicinity, but some confident early adopters have made a start on it. Actually I like this picture more for the bark of the tree, which looks very ancient and Ent-like. This is all in the middle of the UoM campus, not a space normally renowned for feeling rural.
Whatever it is that pigeons do to communicate the information that it is time for a collective take-off, they do it well enough, and quite frequently, too. They will then fly around for a couple of circuits, come back to land (or roof) again, and wait a few minutes before doing it all again. Perhaps it’s just training.
A definite First Day of Spring. The buds on the apple tree anticipated it, however. Well, we call it a ‘tree’ but it’s more like a kind of skein of branches that wrap themselves around some vaguely solid thing that might or might not be a trunk. More like vines, almost. Either way, the apples should be along in a few months’ time.
Crocuses are an annual marker, coming out at the same time each year. This being the case they work as a marker of Joe’s birthday, which is on Tuesday. Each year I remember 2003, which had a very warm first few days of March, spent mostly in Calderdale Royal Hospital while we waited (and Clare pushed, for days) for him to make his appearance. Crocuses were coming up everywhere then, and here are more, 22 years later.
C said she liked both the bird (‘magnificent’, she put it) and the stonework. I, myself, can see no other reasons to like the shot. So these things will do as a title.
Yep, still here. And for another 48 hours, at least. This shot pleases me, though. The third one in a row to depict a creature in some kind of repose, but that is how I feel right now.
There are worse places to be stuck, that is true. And I’ve not been turfed out of my accommodation, I’m not running out of money, and so on. But this has now become my life’s longest-ever flight delay, or indeed travel delay of any kind, and I may not even be halfway through it yet. I am trying to develop a stoic outlook on life — as this guy appears to have done.
I have no idea about the actual identity of this species — and I think these are buds rather than the mature plant — but tell me you don’t think the name is appropriate. Look at the one third from the right on the stalk, it even has an eye in the right place.
St Helena has been subjected to many invasive species since humanity first arrived here five centuries ago, some deliberately planted or otherwise introduced, some accidentally so. In the background, New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), which a while back someone decided would be a good cash crop, it being the basis of things like rope and mailbags. The cash for it stopped flowing fifty years ago, but that doesn’t mean it all decided to stop growing. In the foreground, well, you know what bird that is (Gallus gallus domesticus, according to the biologists): much the same thing happened, but as a chicken is for life and not just for Sunday dinner, when there stopped being much economic point in people looking after them, out into the environment they went. There are now large numbers of feral chickens on the island.
Another bird, yes, but I’ve been trying to get a decent shot of a red fody, a.k.a. common fody (Foudia madagascariensis) since my first visit here. He — and this is definitely a male — really is that red: I’ve not tweaked the colour settings at all on this one. As the species’ Latin name suggests, they are originally from Madagascar, but have made it over to the other side of Africa by one means or another down the centuries.
Being 42 