Well I suppose that you could say that spring is with us once again.

On the trees and hedges the buds for this years growth, while on the ground the first flowers are appearing as this celandine demonstrates.

Meanwhile this female chaffinch looks on curiously from above.

A glance down at a water filled hedgerow ditch finds that it has large amount of jelly like frog spawn (eggs of frogs) in it

If you look closely in the center you can see the dark spherical cluster of cells at the center of the eggs that will develop first into limbless tadpoles and then into young frogs.

This second image was taken six days later and already you can see that the eggs have developed from the spherical form in the above image to a more elongated form as the embryonic frogs develop.

Sadly for these it was not to be, when I returned about a fortnight later the ditch had dried out. Without the water the developing tadpoles had no chance of survival.

Occasionally when I have forgotten my binoculars I will use the camera as a small telescope, take a picture and then use the digital zoom on the camera to see what's there.

In this picture I had centered both my camera and my attention on the rabbit (the rabbit is at the center of the original picture I have cut out this section to avoid having a large image file).

What I had not seen until James pointed it out to me was that we were not the only ones interested in the rabbit that a fox also had its eyes on it.

Although the rabbit did not, at this point, detect our presence the fox did and after a couple of seconds evaluating the situation it ran for cover. I just managed to grab this blurry shot of it disappearing, as I silently uttered some ancient anglosaxon curses at myself for failing to notice it.

Salt would be rubbed into my wounded pride the next day. As you may know occasionally I am accompanied on my walks by Phil's dog smidge, who while often entertaining company can also be a right pain in the bum. This day I had left her back at the farm house so that I could have a nice quite walk all on my own, great no James, no dog.

Having reached the river I had sat down beneath a large ash tree contemplating the meaning of life and all that stuff, when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of the familiar orange / brown coat of smidge in the field boundary ditch close to where I was sitting. Turning, I began to tell her off for following me only to discover that it was the fox who by this time was only three to four feet (about 1 meter) from me.

I don't know which of us was most surprised and for what seemed to be an age we both looked at each other. We both reacted at the same time, I moved for my camera and the fox dived for the cover of the hedge and ditch.

This time I have to confess that I was a little more verbal with my utterances as the fox disappeared into the foliage before I could acquire it with my camera.

I did manage to get this distant shot as it stopped to give me a parting look backwards before it disappeared into a neighboring field.

I shall end this months report with an event which actually occured at the beginning of the month, actually the night of the 3rd/4th of March.

To see it you had to look at the sky. It was a total eclipse of the moon.

 

 

 

 

The lefthand photograph was taken at 22:30hrs (10:30pm) local time on the 3rd and shows the start of the eclipse. The righthand photograph was taken almost two hours later at 00:20hrs (20 minutes past Midnight) on the 4th, and shows the eclipse reaching totality. The red colour is due light from the sun being refracted (bent) by the Earths atmosphere.

That's it for now.

see you next month Andy


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