It looked like we weren't going to have a posting in the diary for the first month since we started, so I made a special effort to do some bird watching today.

There were plenty of the usual winter bird species; Siskin, Brambling and Hawfinch.

Towards the end of the day, I spotted an unusual looking raptor. I'm 90% sure this is a goshawk - but unless I can find someone who knows this sort of stuff, I'll have to record it as a possible ID.

I've included a couple of pictures of branches. The first is of a really strange squared section of a branch on our birch. This weird feature must have required damage to have occurred on the branch at least four times. The second is of some prominent orange fruiting bodies of a fungus (coral spot fungus maybe?) on some of the inner branches of one of the nearby hawthorns.