Rainfall: 225.5mm

Temp High: 18.3^oC on 17th

Temp Low: -5.1^oC on 1st

Temp Average: 4.3^oC 

The first common redstart of the year was in the garden today a full week earlier than we've previously seen one. The photo is through a window and was a bit rushed, so it's a bit blurry.

It's been a while since our last new bird species seen from the garden, but today a group of 6 teal landed in the pond becoming our 101st species.

Some time ago, we got rid of our bird table as it was difficult to clean and we didn't want to get diseases spreading amongst the birds. It's been a while since we saw a sick bird, but earlier this week we had a really sick greenfinch in the garden. I could do little more than keep chasing it out of the garden to reduce exposure to other birds, but it came back and died against the wall of the shed. This was really unusual so it must have had something really nasty.

Today this brambling was in the backgarden not looking too healthy.

Spring is finally here. I got some photos of the red kites carrying nesting material to the trees over the other side of the valley.

This male crossbill came to drink in the pond today. The photos are through a window, but they're better than I expected.

Lastly for today, we had a few black redstarts flying around, joining the chiffchaff I saw earlier in the week as some of the early returning birds.

I've seen this goldcrest for a few days now, but it moves around quite a lot so it's difficult to photograph.

We've had quite a warm weekend and today we saw our first slow worm of the year. We were inspecting our thistle garden when this fatty flopped out of the ivy.

I finally spent some time watching the birds which I haven't done in months. There's a pair of red kites building a nest across the valley and I want to get a photo of the birds flying with nesting material - but they only seem to do this first thing in the morning. Instead I had to make do with a rare visit from a pair of willow tits (we rarely get to hear them call so as to distinguish them from marsh tits which are much more common here).

While dredging out some pond slime, I was surprised to see a newt and then another one. I didn't have my camera with me at the time and after I'd gone to get it, they'd gone. We decided to go out at dusk with a torch. Sure enough, there were at least 3 alpine newts engaged in newt-type activities.

While I had my camera in daylight, I took some photos of the huge number of baby snails we have and a skating beetle I'll try to identify (I probably need a better photo).

Here's another picture of this year's snowdrops in the orchard.

We are glad to see that all the work done on the garden last year hasn't affected the snowdrops too much. We moved a large number out of the way of the work, but we can bring some of those back now to fill in the gaps.

Our hazel tree has the best show of female flowers we've ever seen, so it might be a mast year again.