Rainfall: 154.2mm

Temp High: 24.4^oC on 29th

Temp Low: 0.9^oC on 4th

Temp Average: 11.3^oC

A flock of 20 or so siskins landed in our garden early this morning and spent half an hour grooming themselves before flying off noisily. I think there are ten siskins in this photo although it is difficult to see as they're the same colours as the autumnal leaves.

It's been a quiet month for diary entries. Sorry about that!

Today I went out in the garden with the aim of finding at least one thing worthy of a diary entry. In the event, it wasn't difficult to find a few things.

The pond is a good source of activity - it's all new to us. A few days ago, I cleared some of the pond slime that had enveloped our mini water lily. I really was expecting slime, but when I hooked it out of the water it actually looked quite interesting - a network of lime green threads that looked like felt. We put some of it in our shed to dry off. Here's a photo - I can't believe this hasn't been used for weaving or fabric at some time.

Currently, the pond has loads of these floating islands of eggs. I've bottled some up so I can observe what they are if they hatch.

We spread loads of wildflower seeds in the upper orchard in spring. Very few things came up, but we've got several of these huge dandelion-like plants growing. Christine thinks they might be chicory - as chicory is biennial, this makes a lot of sense.

In the front garden, I did some strimming earlier this week and I exposed what I originally thought was a layer of polystyrene under the grass on a bank near the house. Having poked it a bit and realizing it smelt mushroomy, we've decided it is a fungal mycelium layer.

Lastly, I decided to take a look around to see if I could expand my moth species by looking for leaf mines. Here's the first one I found on our patio - Stigmella tityrella in a green island in a beech leaf. I'll see if I can breed this through - but I know they're really difficult to get to adulthood in captivity.

I've been meaning to take some photos of some of the new residents in our pond. Considering that the pond only started filling up in June, it's incredible how quickly they've arrived. These are Bithynia tentaculata which apparently can be spread by wading birds - but these probably came in with some of the pond plants we bought.

Our wildlife camera captured a pine marten drinking from the pond this morning at 1:50am.

Later on, during the day, we found this weird variagated clover in the lawn. We're not sure what caused that.

There were three of these forest bugs sunning themselves beside the house. They seemed to be wandering around aimlessly as if they were waiting for some cold weather to finish them off.

We've had some substantial piles of poo in the garden recently - which looked like badger poo - so we put our wildlife camera out.

At around 2:30 this morning we had two young deer running around the pond, but no badgers. How do I know there were two deer? Well we also have a video which showed the first one moving down the hill followed by the second, smaller individual.