A Pointless Twitch, a Solstice Tree and a Supermoon

Saturday 2nd December 2017
A bird in the bush...

An early morning start up to North Lincolnshire and a housing estate in sunny Scunthorpe. Why? To see a bird of course. A White-crowned Black Wheatear, potentially only the second ever in this country. Turned out to have come all the way from... its cage two roads away, where an 80 year old man kept a bewildering array of bird species, none of which belong in a cage.

It was not an entirely wasted journey as it was a good chance to catch up with lots of my loonier birding friends.

Sunday 3rd December 2017

Bit of a lie-in.

Overnight we lost one of the monster chicks. It was much smaller than the rest, so no surprise really. The others are going strong. They eat and drink constantly! Have now opened their pen so they can wander a little and meet the other poultry - they'll have to learn to stand on their own two feet a bit more.


And now for the big surprise. We have a Christmas tree, a real one, a 10 foot whopper of a one!
Well it was sold to us as a Christmas tree, but I view it firmly as a Solstice celebration tree. I don't do Christmas.
I'm not sure Sue will let me take it down on 22nd December though, or let me open my presents on 21st 😉

Even better we got it for a tenner straight from the ground and only a couple of miles down the road in our nearest village. A couple had recently moved in and wanted to convert an area over for their horses. Hence the need to get rid of the trees which a previous owner had planted as foot high post-Christmas pound-a-tree items from the local garden centre.

The journey home was a bit dodgy but we made it.

I have to admit that decorating the tree was actually quite good fun and it will bring joy and celebration to the farmhouse as the shortest day approaches. Here is the final product.

The day was capped off with excellent, cloud-free views of December's Supermoon.

It was too big to fit on my blog properly!!!