Imagination Required

I started this morning by scraping my car of the thick ice coating the windows. It seemed a little unfair somehow, as otherwise where I live it appeared a cold but clear morning. However, on my drive in to Foxglove the closer I got the more snow there was on the ground and I arrived to a sparkling and beautiful morning, a thin crust of ice on the snow.

The ponies seemed at home in the snow with their thick coats and were still finding vegetation to tuck into.

Colin came in and filled our bird feeders – thank you very much!

With our newly-improved (with more upgrading to come) camera system I discovered live-action bird feeder filling was available in fairly good definition in the Field Centre!

The snow can be handy for showing us which animals have been around – here we can see that a rabbit has been using our boardwalk.

There were, on the other hand, downsides to today’s snow: The thin crust of ice made moving quietly difficult, so as I headed back to the Field Centre through the scrapes the kingfisher heard me coming and all I saw was it flying away…but I went back to the scrapes later, to collect some materials for a children’s event tomorrow. This time I was extra careful and quiet. I got lucky! It had returned and I got close enough to see it perched on the rail by the dipping platform, looking intently for (presumably) our stickleback. I even got my first ever photo of a kingfisher before it spotted me and departed. However, my camera was not on board with my plan to focus on the kingfisher, so please use your imagination - it’s the blue/orange out-of-focus blur in the middle of the picture!