We saw our first house martins of the year today. There was a flock of about 20 flying around the house, but they were flying quite high - hence the distant photo.

I've taken a couple of days off work as we've got a lot to do in the garden. As luck would have it, it's been really warm and sunny today. Being out and about, we saw lots of birds and insects, but I didn't have my camera with me.

When we finished for the day, I looked out of the kitchen window and saw another nightingale. I rushed upstairs to get some photos. This was a skulky individual and it look some time for him/her to come out into the open. Luckily, while it was hiding, I looked over the wider view and saw a couple of whinchats, both males.

We saw the first orange-tip butterflies of the year today. This one was nectaring on our first cuckoo flowers.

I got up especially early to see if there were any interesting birds about. I think it was too cold as there wasn't much going on. There was a male blackcap singing at the top of one of the willows.

We've had a lot of starlings in the garden which is pretty normal at this time of year. Once again, they seem to be nesting over the other side of the valley, but feeding on our side. They particularly like our fat balls and they are polishing them off as quick as we can put them out.

There's still a common redstart about and various other birds like a green woodpecker and a treecreeper.

The sunny weather has brought out the first bee flies. We did a fly workshop a few weeks back and we learnt that there is actually more than one type of bee fly. This one is the dark-edged bee-fly. I'm hoping to see a dotted bee fly or any of the other three of four likely species.

Lastly, we've only just noticed a strange shrub at the end of our garden. It's too early to identify as we only have some buds at the moment, but we can't work out what it is yet. **UPDATE** We've now indentified this as Juneberry.

The weather has been a bit cold for the past few days, but today it was warm and sunny.

We were working in the garden when we heard a bird song which was unmistakedly a nightingale. We rushed into the house and watched out of the window. Sure enough, not one, but two nightingales were hopping about in their favourite place below the fatballs.

It took a bit of time to get them to come out into the open, but eventually they did - allowing me to take some pretty nice photos.

I finally got around to photographing a caterpillar we found underneath some willow catkins we brought into the house a few weeks ago. This is one of the sallow moths. It eats catkins until they fall and then switches to herbaceous plants in the grass below the tree. The caterpillars of the 10 or so sallow species all look quite similar and have the same catkin/herbaceous plant feeding strategy so I'll have to breed this one through to identify it properly. I'm going to guess it is "The Sallow", Cirrhia icteritia.

The migration continues with a surprise visit from a wryneck. He was eating ants from the ant nest beside the shed entrance where we saw our first wryneck several years ago.

There were some supporting performances from common redstarts and goldfinches (this one was grooming after a heavy downpour).

Our big bird migration day has crept up on me. I took a day off work to see what birds turn up, not really expecting anything as the weather has been so poor. To illustrate how far behind things are, here is a picture of our bird cherry today, with a comparison with the same day last year. We reckon it is about two weeks behind.

With that in mind, I fully expected the migration to be late too - but after a slow start, it really was a great day.

Once the fog lifted, we had our first blackcaps in the garden and we heard the first ones singing this year. Our regular birds too provided some interest: a couple of great tits were mating in the trees and a pair of long-tailed tits, which have been visiting us every day for a couple of weeks, gave us a fright when only one visited this morning. Later, the two were back together. There were a lot of singing black redstarts around and the blue tits are still being aggressive.

And then the migration started. First a common redstart, then a whinchat and finally a pied flycatcher.

The day ended with a pair of house sparrows. We rarely get tree or house sparrows around us, so this is really unusual.

I've included another photo of a hawfinch to balance the page.

In all, we recorded 31 bird species in the garden today.

The squirrels are back in numbers. This is a nice red one.

There are quite a lot of birds around at the moment including hawfinches.

There were some strange bubbles in the pond this morning. They were there for about 30 mins and then they disappeared.

The blue tits are fired up and this one was displaying between bouts of chasing away rivals.

The pine marten was back around today. He looks cute, but we don't really want him around the house as there are lots of nesting birds, so I sprayed him with my super soaker. Instead of running away, he hid under the eaves of the shed. It was clear that he has often used this spot and we reckon is he could probably catch birds from there. I had to go out to the shed and make lots of noise to get rid of him.

Finally I've included a photo of a pair of marsh tits.

This strangely marked magpie visited the garden today. You can see he's got some grey panels and no black wing stripe.

We had a very large pine marten in the garden today eating the peanuts off the bird table. We've found the fatball holder on the ground, emptied, a couple of mornings this week and suspect that this individual is responsible.

It was a nice sunny day. This blackbird was doing the silly basking behaviour that we see in this sort of weather.

The two willows in the garden are buzzing. We've posted photos of the differences between these two willows in the past. I thought I'd post pictures of the catkins as those are very different.

A dunnock was singing in the sun.

There were a lot of great spotted woodpeckers about including these two rotating around a birch stump.

I meant to get up early today to see what birds were about, but I overslept (it was a holiday).

Even so, I managed to see a couple of Egyptian Geese briefly visit the pond.

There was lots of bird activity all day. The blue tits have been extremely aggressive and today I saw two rolling around next to the car with feathers flying. This wasn't a quick skirmish - they were at each other for a couple of minutes.

There were a couple of mistle thrushes in the garden.

The reptiles and amphibians were taking a hammering with the buzzards and crows catching slow worms and toads. The buzzard dispatched the slow worm in seconds but the crow spent a long time with this unfortunate toad whose legs were waving around for quite a while. Earlier, one of the crows had been gently pecking over the grass looking for insects.

The garden is alive with displaying birds at the moment. Today we had two carrion crows preening each other in the birch, yesterday we had great tits lekking from the sandy foundations of our old patio (which we're digging up at the moment) and parachuting blue tits are a constant presence.

One of our male great spotted woodpeckers has found a particularly resonant branch on a nearby poplar to drum on. He's so predictable that you can see him heading that way and you know he'll be hammering in a few minutes.

Our little patch of woodland has burst into life and isn't the impenetrable jungle it used to be so we have discovered a nice patch of wood anemones which we've never seen in there before.