Tag: birds

Big Garden Birdwatch 2025

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A bird feeder stands in a small suburban garden. It is just about possible to see a starling pecking at a suet ball.

I missed last year’s Big Garden Birdwatch because I was in hospital.

The year before that I was in Avignon.

In 2023 I diligently sat in the conservatory for a whole hour and saw:

  • One unidentifiable Little Brown Job
  • One wood pigeon, which sat for a very long time on my neighbour’s chimney and never came into my garden, and could not therefore be counted.

I was therefore very pleased with this year’s much more respectable list:

  • Two wood pigeons
  • Five long-tailed tits
  • Two blackbirds
  • Four house sparrows
  • One robin
  • One great tit
  • One blue tit

And, in the “not a bird” category, a grey squirrel. Much more like it.

Thinking of big skies

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Grey road, grey sky, bare trees, green field, band of pale pink at the horizon

I took a slightly longer walk today, long enough for my legs to stop feeling wobbly and then start feeling wobbly again. I came out from the corridor of trees and stopped at the road for longer than I usually would, noticing the pull of the flat land beyond the A10. It was cold, and there was no sun so it felt colder, and I would have liked to cross the main road and walk out under the grey sky towards the band of pale pink. Instead, I carried on, noticing how very cold it was, how very bare the trees, how very spiky their twigs. I reminded myself that I wasn’t going to feel this weak forever, that this wasn’t COVID or pregnancy, that it was going to be a matter of days rather than months. Thought that I ought to pump up the tyres of my road bike for when I should be ready to cross the road, but not yet. Then, in the trees, birdsong: I guessed it was a robin, and then looked up, and up, and saw it at the very top.

Not quite everyday nature

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A partially knitted sock in stripes of white, red, brown, yellow and white/grey on a red plaid

I’ve embarked on one of last year’s Christmas presents, Everyday Nature by Andy Beer. This has a couple of paragraphs for each day, each examining a different natural phenomenon.

This being the week it’s been, I haven’t been able to act on much of it. New Year’s Day, for example, we were encouraged to go out for a nature walk. Not a hope. Today’s entry is on Venus: it’s cloudy.

But never mind. This morning on the bird feeders I saw: bluetits, a robin, a starling, and something that might have been a dunnock. (I am not very good at telling the difference between sparrows and dunnocks.) There were two grey squirrels chasing each other along the back fence. Yesterday there was a wren on the trellis.

This evening I returned to my goldfinch sock (self-striping yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners). Goldfinches were in the book for 2 January: I didn’t see any on Thursday (maybe I’ll get a nyger seed feeder to encourage them) but I can at least enjoy their sense of style.

First walk of the new year

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Silver birch trees seen across an expanse of grass, lit up with sunlight against a cloudless blue sky

By way of contrast with yesterday, today’s weather was everything that early January ought to be: cold, clear, and lit with gentle gold sunlight. I always struggle, when in recovery, with finding the balance between “keeping active” and “overdoing it”: today’s walk was probably about a kilometre, which was about right. More to the point, it put me in the company of the sun, and the bluetits, and the wagtails, and these trees.

Wild lunchtime

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
In the centre of a pool surrounded by rushes, a coot sits in the middle of its own rings of ripples

This lunchtime I walked – briskly; there was a chilly wind – to Camley Street Natural Park. I had passed it many times, but never turned up the little side street to find the entrance until today. It’s a tiny sliver of wildness wedged between two great railway stations, St Pancras and King’s Cross – a managed wildness, but a wildness none the less.

The rushes are tall, and the trees are tall, and mostly still in leaf, and though you can look across the canal and see diners eating expensive lunches in the new King’s Cross development, or look into the canal and see a discarded shoe, and hear the whine of electric trains coming into and going out of St Pancras, it still has the sense of being a place set apart. I looked up, and saw fluffed-up bluetits; down, and saw coots dabbling; across, and saw a bold blackbird. I’ll be going back.

Week-end: let’s try this again

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Textile artwork representing a map of the London area of Bloomsbury with quotations from notable women associated with the area
Artwork by Margaret Talbot at the Bridging the Gap exhibition at Babylon Arts

The good

Summer! It’s sunny, but it’s not too outrageously hot. I opened up the new Ffern perfume at about seven in the morning on the summer solstice. Gorgeous.

The mixed

OK, it’s a bit muggy.

The difficult and perplexing

A gallstone attack when I was out for a walk. Extremely painful and unpleasant. Had to retreat under a shady tree and be sick into a hedge in relative private. I am on the waiting list to have my gall bladder removed. I continue to wait.

What’s working

I’ve been playing around with bullet journalling, in its original iteration as a glorified to-do list, and not bothering trying to make it pretty. It’s actually working pretty well as a way to keep track of the sixteen different mixed metaphorical plates I have spinning.

Reading

I devoured She Who Became The Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan). It’s great. It’s a historical epic with a little magical realism, and is particularly inspiring to me at the moment in that the author simply decided to have fun (I am paraphrasing what she says in her acknowledgements here) and created an excellent book. I should note that it’s fairly bleak and occasionally very gory, and a few months ago I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it at all.

Elsewhere, I got through the long long nights with the whole of the Chalet School series (Elinor M. Brent-Dyer). I have gone back and begun again at the beginning (just finished Exile last night), but I also took a little side-step and tried out the Crater School series (Chaz Brenchley). Also a load of fun: it’s a pitch-perfect homage and is, you know, a boarding school story on Mars.

Then I picked up Cinderella Ate My Daughter (Peggy Orenstein), which takes a look at the consumer culture surrounding children, particularly girls. It was published in 2011, and I couldn’t help wondering how different it would look post-Frozen, and after Britney-gate. There’s also barely any mention of trans identities, which in 2024 seems an obvious angle to explore. I should probably be grateful.

Writing

Bits and pieces.

Making

A little smocked dress. I finished the front and then decided that the back also needed to be smocked, so I’m back in the tedious gathering stage.

Watching

The Great British Sewing Bee. I am behind on Doctor Who, but having been spoiled for the last couple of episodes I’m not sure that I’ll make the effort to catch up.

Looking at

Bridging the Gap, an exhibition by women textile artists, all members of EAST (East Anglian Stitch Textiles) at Babylon Arts. I was rather taken by a whimsical map of Bloomsbury embellished with quotations from notable women associated with the area, but my favourite pieces were probably Margaret Talbot‘s gorgeous landscapes.

Cooking

Beef pot roast in the Instant Pot. It’s not exactly the weather for it, but at least the pressure cooker minimises the cooking heat.

Eating

We went out to Wildwood for our anniversary; I had bruschetta, seafood linguine, and tiramisu.

Moving

A very, very gentle run-up (ha) to Couch to 5k, beginning with a lot more walking even than that routine recommends. So far, so good.

Noticing

Goldfinches!

In the garden

Complete chaos, but this evening I have managed to take the compost out, water the passion flower on the front fence, and pull up a few weeds.

Appreciating

Suddenly having a little more time to myself.

Acquisitions

Mostly clothes: four dresses from the Joanie sale, a sports bra, and ankle socks. Yesterday I took three books to the book swap cabinet at the top of the hill – and came home with two. Oh well.

Line of the week

From Cinderella Ate My Daughter:

While Zoe is cute, in a radioactive orange kind of way, her release fell short of expectations, the – ka-ching! – hope of creating a female Elmo. Even slapping a tutu on her did not help.

This coming week

What’s become the regular routine – and will be for a few weeks more – and then a very busy weekend.

That’s it for the moment. I’m hoping to keep this going, but no promises. I hope you’re all keeping well.

Week-end: alarums and excursions

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Four houses, all with many small birds perched along the ridges of the roofs

The good

My friend Maggie was ordained priest yesterday. I’d said a while ago not to bother saving me a ticket, because I might well be otherwise engaged, but in the event I wasn’t, so I watched the service on Youtube and then walked up to the cathedral to give her a hug afterwards. (I timed it pretty much perfectly: left the house during the distribution of communion; got there just as the bishop and new priests were coming out to have their photos taken.)

It was really lovely to get out and see people (there were others I knew milling around, because the Church of England is a very small world). It was lovely to get out at all, really.

The mixed

Slow progress is still progress. Midnight alarums and excursions (don’t worry, everything’s fine).

The difficult and perplexing

Really, aside from a mild case of cabin fever, I have nothing to worry about. I’m not dealing terribly well with waiting, but then I never do.

What’s working

Picking one thing to do, doing that, and then having a lie-down.

Reading

I finished the main run of The Comfortable Courtesan stories, got a bit weepy at the end, and decided that I wasn’t quite feeling up to tackling the extended universe.

I also read Along the Way: the journey of a father and son (Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Hope Edelman). My favourable impression of this began with the fact that the ghostwriter is credited in large letters on the cover, and continued more or less all the way through. It’s mostly a memoir of family life, but it goes into a lot of detail on the making of The Way. (Which is what drew me to pick it up in the library discard sale.) I was very surprised to discover that they were shooting The Way in September 2009, which was only a couple of years after I walked the Camino Frances. But then it takes a long time for a film to happen, and I didn’t see it on its first release.

I’ve written before, briefly, about where The Way fails to convey the sheer grinding physicality of the Camino. And it is the physicality that sticks with me: the texture of boots that have been left too close to the fire overnight; walking through period pain so intense that I was sick (never before or since…) I think it’s basically impossible to get across such a three-dimensional (four-dimensional, maybe: time is an important component) experience in a two-dimensional medium. What the film does capture is the power of encounter and relationship; what it skips over is the fleeting nature of most of those encounters.

But Along the Way wasn’t just a book about the film; it was about parenthood, and masculinity (toxic and otherwise), and acting, and the film industry, and faith, and what all of that looks like in practice. And it seemed honest, and it was a very engaging read.

I am not sure that I would walk the Camino again – certainly not in summer, probably not the Camino Frances – and a lot of that is feeling that I’ve had my turn and I need to make space for other people. And, of course, the less generous flipside, which is that there are now too many people on the Camino, and it would no longer be what it was. (Of course it wouldn’t: I’m not twenty-one any more. Or thirty-one. And I seem to do it at major transitions in my life, and the current major transition is one that makes long-distance walking a lot less practical than it was. And the pilgrimage-shaped hole in my life is currently filled with Cursillo. Although I shouldn’t be entirely surprised if I end up doing it again at forty-one, never mind everything that I’ve just said.) And I’m sure The Way had something, though not everything, to do with the increase in traffic. Even so, I came away from this book feeling in greater charity towards the film and towards the Sheen/Estevez clan in general. They seem like a good bunch.

Making

I’ve been sewing two flannels together (very slowly) and will shortly add a popper as a fastening, so that I end up with a pouch that I can fill with ends of soap that have got too small and annoying to be in the soap dish.

Watching

Still almost entirely sports. Eastbourne, last week, and now the Tour and the Giro Donne. (A friend has suggested that we name the impending sprog after whoever wins the day’s stage. I am not sure that we will go with this.)

Looking at

Pictures of London Pride on Instagram. I’m wryly amused that I ignored or turned down four separate offers of wristbands (the bisexuals, the Bond fans, the Christians, and work – not sure this really counts as intersectionality) on the grounds that I might be busy, and then was only very slightly busy. But actually I’ve never particularly wanted to go to London Pride, and the idea of going to London at all is mightily unappealing at present.

Cooking

Roast carrots and parsnips with quinoa, from the Roasting Pan Cookbook. Either the timings in the book are off, or the fan function of our oven is not trustworthy, but an extra ten minutes on the standard oven function and with the foil removed did the trick, and the result was very nice.

Also a new potato, broad bean and feta salad. (Mint, thyme and bayleaves in the cooking water; chopped chervil, parsley and capers in the dressing. Really very good.)

And I think I’ve finally got the knack of yoghurt in the Instant Pot (use full fat milk, boil for an extra five minutes beyond what the pot thinks, incubate for five hours).

The peach shrub is done in theory but in practice needs to mellow more. Still, it has got me to learn how to use the Soda Stream at long last (it’s not at all difficult; I am just not that interested in fizz).

Eating

As above.

Noticing

Hollyhocks! They seem to be a thing around here; they grow very tall and they are bright and cheerful. Maybe I should grow some.

And, as per picture at the top of this post, rooftops and rooftops of starlings. They are usually around, but not usually in such numbers. We’d had eight or so demolishing a suet cake on the bird feeder earlier in the day, but I wasn’t expecting to see this. This isn’t even all the relevant roofs. I don’t know if you can call it a murmuration if it’s mostly static, but either way, it was quite a sight.

In the garden

Fruit is swelling. (I’m going to have to pull up some of the jungle under the plum trees in order to be able to harvest without being scratched or stung.) Lots of things could do with a trim. There are just a couple of love-in-a-mist flowers that have self-seeded from plants I grew… maybe our first year here?

I have drawn up a plan for the front but am not going to act on it until bending over becomes more comfortable.

Appreciating

People! (Particularly Tony.)

Hankering

I’m missing the old days of LiveJournal, the way it used to be in 2006 or so. Most of the social media sites seem to be becoming unusable in one way or another. I just want to see what the people I like are up to! In such a way that I can find the posts again if I want to look back at them! And without having to look at the same one over and over and over again!

The cat’s current preferred location

On top of the paper trimmer in the conservatory. I am glad she has moved on from the fridge; I can’t feel that having little clumps of black fluff float down into the kitchen was entirely sanitary.

Line of the week

Havi on screens and screening:

Nature abhors a vacuum, and goes wild for a door.

This coming week

Your guess is as good as mine, honestly.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

Week-end: hurry up and wait

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A fluffy black and white cat looks down at the camera from the top of a fridge

The good

I tested negative for Covid on Wednesday, after not having bothered (it wasn’t as if I was going anywhere) since last Friday. This is a great relief. It seems to have knocked me out less than the last bout did, though I’m still falling asleep all the time (mind you, I’ve been doing that for the last nine months…)

The difficult and perplexing

(I said I’d be whingeing about this for months to come:) it’s too hot.

What’s working

The sofa bed. Ice lollies.

Reading

Other than finishing off The Chronicles of Count Antonio, I’ve been rereading The Comfortable Courtesan series. I’ve got up to Domestick Disruptions. I’d forgotten how fast everything happens in the beginning: the epistolick mathematickal flirtation, the appearance of Mr F-, the elopement… I think that probably reflects the way that it started out being written a few sentences at a time; but anyway, the contrast with the current story (which I am also keeping up with) is quite interesting.

Mending

I was feeling vaguely energetic yesterday, so I did a couple of darns on a couple of Tony’s T-shirts.

Watching

Queen’s, mostly, though I have also been falling asleep in front if it.

Cooking

I was looking forward to veg box peaches, but the texture was really not pleasant. So I’m experimenting making peach shrub.

Eating

A tiramisu gelato. Very nice it was too. And wild strawberries, straight off the plants.

Noticing

A great spotted woodpecker! It came up from the other side of the fence, so I saw the head first, then the spotted bit, and finally the red flash and tail. That’s two woodpeckers I’ve seen in the garden now (there was a green one a couple of years ago).

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time sitting under the pergola, and have seen various birds from there. Sparrows. A robin. There’s also a very bold thrush which doesn’t seem to be at all bothered by my wandering right past.

In the garden

Besides birds – the nasturtiums are on the point of flowering; the pink roses are going great guns, as are the Peruvian lilies. I bought some French sorrel from a plant stand outside someone’s house and put that in.

We’re thinking of what we can do with the front garden, which at present is a dismal rectangle of slate chippings. It’s more or less eastward facing and gets a lot of sun; what it won’t reliably get is water, because the water butts and outside tap are all round the back, and I’ve been having enough trouble getting around the back garden with a watering can the last couple of years. I understand that this part of the country is technically a desert; it certainly feels like one today. Also we don’t want anything that grows higher than about four feet, or it’ll block the light to the front window. Thus far my mind is defaulting to tulips, but we also need something for the months of the year that aren’t April. I don’t think I’ve ever had a blank slate (pun not intended) garden before; it’s a little daunting.

Appreciating

Sleep.

Acquisitions

French sorrel. A baby changing mat and some anti-scratch mitts. A bird feeder with an anti-squirrel cage.

Hankering

Looked at some filleting knives but didn’t buy any. And we can’t get the garden table we had our eye on without also getting the chairs, which we don’t want. (The little one we got last month is excellent for the two of us, but won’t be much help when it comes to company, or when company comes to us.)

The cat’s current preferred location

On top of the fridge.

Line of the week

From The Menologium, quoted and translated by Eleanor Parker in Winters in the World:

… It likes then/ to gaze longer upon the earth and to move more slowly/ across the fields of the world, the fairest of lights/ and of all created things.

This coming week

More waiting, I expect.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Ideas for what to do with a small eastward-facing plot? Share them here!

Week-end: so you can cycle while you cycle

kathleenjowitt2 Comments
Swans' nest, with one bird on the nest and the other swimming in the ditch below, dabbling its beak in the water. There's also a mallard drake, possibly also on a nest.

The good

We had a weekend at a spa! I had never done this before, having mentally classified it under ‘not for the likes of us’ and also been nervous about getting it all wrong and exposing myself as a total fraud, but the in-laws suggested it as a nice thing to do before the baby appears and we disappear into a mountain of laundry, and I had to admit they had a point. So we booked into Quy Mill, just outside Cambridge, for one of the few free weekends we have this summer.

Anyhow, the conversation somehow moved from ‘haha, we could cycle there!’ to ‘actually, we could cycle there!’ and our successful excursion to an antenatal class in Littleport demonstrated that taking the Bromptons on the train and cycling to our destination was perfectly practical. (I know this in theory, but it had been a while since I’d put it into practice.) So we decided to cycle there. And then the purchase of a cargo bike happened rather faster than we’d anticipated, and suddenly it made sense for Tony to pick that up on the way. Fortunately it is large enough to hold one folded Brompton, so he was able to cycle to pick up the new bike and then cycle onwards on the new bike carrying the old one. (Yo dawg, I heard you liked cycling, so I put a cycle in your cycle so you can cycle while you cycle…)

This made it possibly the most Cambridge spa trip imaginable, even if we hadn’t then cycled over to Anglesey Abbey the next day.

It was very pleasant. There was extremely nice food; I had a lot of stress massaged out of my back; I also had my toenails painted. I went swimming twice. And we avoided most of the coronation hoohah. (I am what you might call a pragmatic monarchist: I can quite see that you need someone to cut the ribbons and all that, but my patience for the breathless commentary had been wearing very, very thin.)

Other good things this week: the political news was encouraging; the antenatal class was very interesting; the garden is flourishing.

The mixed

I generally enjoy thunderstorms, but not when I’m trying to get somewhere. I spent quite a long time sheltering in the underpass beneath the A14, 300 metres from my destination, but also 300 metres from the last lightning strike.

Also I got lost in Fen Ditton. This is becoming a habit and I could really do without it. I think I’d have beat the thunderstorm had it not been for that extra two kilometres.

The difficult and perplexing

I haven’t quite got the hang of ‘winding down’; or, rather, I’m doing OK at the doing less, but not so well at the feeling OK about it.

What’s working

Being outside. Using the Brompton rather than the (heavy) town bike.

Reading

I’m keeping on with Seven Ages of Paris (Alistair Horne). Have reached the twentieth century. No mention of the buses yet but it may yet happen (we have had the taxis of the Marne). Began Towers in the Mist (Elizabeth Goudge) – more appropriate than I’d realised, since the action begins on May day.

Finished Black Gay British Christian Queer (Jarel Robinson-Brown): very good indeed. Also God’s Lovers in an Age of Anxiety (Joan M. Nuth); Julian of Norwich continues to be the best.

Read Miss Marple’s Final Cases and finally ran out of steam with Agatha Christie with Murder is Easy.

Watching

Never Say Never Again was on telly on bank holiday Monday, so I joined in the Licence To Queer watchalong. I think it’s rather underrated, actually, and I much prefer it to the original Thunderball (omits the coercion and a lot of the tedious shark stuff).

I have been watching the Giro d’Italia with Tony. And we managed to turn on the telly at exactly the right moment to hear the new Vivats in I Was Glad (and then to be irritated by the commentators talking over the rest of it and confirm our decision not to watch any more coronation stuff).

Looking at

The Last Supper, a set of sculptures by Silvy Weatherall, at the cathedral. These are abstract busts made from broken crockery stuck together with gold, kintsugi style. While I could see what she was getting at, I failed to get beyond my initial reaction – which was ‘Doctor Who monsters’.

Cooking

‘Asian-style aromatic pork’ from one of the slow cooker books – OK but not particularly exciting.

Eating

Quy Mill did very nicely by us. I was particularly impressed by the slow-cooked lamb and the (remarkably light) sticky toffee pudding. Last night we went to the White Hart in Fulbourn, and I had a Mediterranean vegetable pizza.

Moving

Cycling – nothing further than 8km, but quite a few short journeys. (It’s rather galling to have someone on the exact same bike whoosh past you, but I don’t think he was seven months pregnant…) And swimming.

Noticing

Nesting swans on Ditton Meadows (when I rode past on Friday evening, the one that wasn’t in charge of the nest was blocking half the cycle path; today, it was swimming in the ditch). A wagtail at the hotel this morning. Very vocal blackbirds. The same graffiti on the Chesterton railway bridge that’s been there as long as I can remember.

In the garden

Loads of apple blossom, and bees enjoying it. Plenty of wisteria flowering too. The white rose that always flowers first has five buds; the others are beginning to think about it.

Appreciating

A four-day week. A weekend of mild hedonism.

Acquisitions

I have mentioned the cargo bike – not that I shall be riding it for another couple of months. A couple of small fripperies in the shop at Anglesey Abbey.

Hankering

We’re considering some garden furniture – the main problem being that ‘big enough to eat dinner off’ and ‘small enough to fit sensibly under the pergola’ are incompatible specifications. Some thought required…

Line of the week

From the London Review of Books, here’s Sam Rose on Clive Bell:

it’s hard to feel very sorry for a man who insisted on having it all, got more than his fair share, and spent his life increasingly embittered about the little that had been denied him.

This coming week

Another bank holiday, another antenatal class, some travel that’s become rather more complicated than it needed to be, and, most excitingly, a wedding.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!