A birdy busy day

April 22, 2012

A birdy busy day

It's been all action here today. We started off with a walk as it was lovely and sunny.

We decided to walk through Poole and then go across the old Poole lifting bridge to Hamworthy and then come back along the new Twin Sails Bridge. It turned out to be a good walk of about an hour and we times it just right as the Twin Sails opens at 11.30 so we watched that too.

This is the old bridge.

and some lovely old boats. Poole is such a perfect mix of the old traditional fishing and shipping port and the new sleek home of Sunseeker with all the huge expensive cruisers.

The area is still very much under development

This is the view from on the bridge by one of the barriers

and in this one you can see the split where it separates when it opens.

I love the twisted spiraled metal that looks like waves

and this is it open

and, if this works it will be amazing.

For the first time I used the video on my i phone and it is the bridge opening and a boat going through.

Let's see - not the greatest video in the world but kind of neat to see it opening.

Well for a first effort I don't think it is too bad. It was a bit windy as you can hear.

This second clip is a boat that had been waiting taking its turn and going through

Photo of the day

When we came home I wanted to scrap but we have spent a lot of time watching the birds and saw our first greenfinches today.

But we also had a problem. we have a gorgeous cat (who has a death wish on our road) down the road. he is a grey Burmese I think but he is very naughty. I glanced out of the window and screamed as he was on our lawn with the blackbird in his mouth. We both ran out - me barefoot - and he dropped the bird which, thankfully, flew off. We then chased the cat out of the bushes and drenched him with the hose. I would never ever hurt any animals, especially a cat, but i have no worry about soaking them. Our aim was to try and scare him so he felt our garden was not a nice place to be and didn't come back. We have now done that three times so far this afternoon. He is a tenacious little cat! Our cats have never hunted - they don't go out often and never had cats that go out at night. I know it is only nature for them but i feel so guilty as we have lured these birds into our garden and I would hate to be responsible for them being killed. Consequently I haven't done much other than watch out of the window to protect the birds.

The little robin family are very tame though and even came to say thank you whilst we were out there on cat duty.

We also found an empty half egg shell. I think it may be a pigeon as it is was white and the others all seem to lay pale blue or speckled eggs. It looked like one that had hatched rather than been raided.

These are my last two challenges for Shimelle's crop

This was the one to use a sketch and I used this one

and this is my page - another for the Austria album

The couple in the photo were two people we made friends with on the tour and ended up sharing quite a few meals and trips together. It was funny as they had a daughter my age called Karen and she was married to someone called Nigel. How bizarre was that!

Finally my last challenge is the one to scrap in 4 separate quadrants. I couldn't make it work with 4 even sections so here is my effort, about our obsession.

I used Linday Jane's In the Forest collection from Pickleberrypop