It's not always raining

Road home

Rise up.

If you get up at 7.30 you will have missed all the colours in the sky. Incredibly brief oranges and pinks that creep above the house until it can finally reach the mountains behind us, turning them pink. Awesome. I am grateful to see it every single time. 

Sunset one Tuesday

when you've been away in hot London City, and you are a little tired of buildings and pavements and people and traffic, then its very very good to come home. 

Curlew family pictures...

The curlews in the field are a family of six; two parents, three babies as far as I can work out, and boy are they shouty... I am going to miss them when they leave next month, apparently by the end of July they will have returned to a coastline, to potter about in the mud. I wonder where they are going, ( we aren't particularly near a coast!) and I wish I could go too, or track them somehow.  How on earth they managed to hatch three babies the size of goose eggs, on the floor,  in a field running with foxes, pole cats, hares, buzzards and kites, heaven knows - but they did it. 

Incredibly hard to photograph, considering they are literally above our heads most of the day, they like to dip and dive and go from light to dark backgrounds in nanoseconds, leaving me and my poor camera to do what we can.  Heres four of them, coming in to the field. The other two were there too, just not in my shot. 

Theres three in this picture {above}  One about to land and two already down. The youngsters I think, one of them has not perfected a smooth landing yet.. you can see its tumble of wings up in the grass to help not fall flat on its face.... with beaks ending up about 15cm longs ( thank you google) I can imagine it takes some skill to fly and land with that on your face.  Despite their size and huge wing span they are really gentle types and very nervy - not even slightly threatening, not even with that beak. 

You'll have to humour me going on about them, it feels pretty special,  part of a species that is involved in many campaigns to save it, projects to release it, protected nests and tireless teams of curlew-aholics working to save and look after them, and we just get a family rock up and successfully nest next to us. Awesome. 

incoming weather...

Until I lived here I had never been 'above the weather'. Or beside it, or watched it cross the valley in front of you.  Now it happens all the time. Because I am spending half my life up a hill or ten. The sky is awesome, and the rain pours down 'just over there' and then you can watch it move along.