Time to talk

Birdlife

It's been very hot up here today, so generally a lazy day apart from a little grocery shopping.
Anyway 7pm and we decide to sit outside and have a bottle of Cote du Rhone to see the evening out.
We get to talking ,as you do occasionally after 40 years of marriage, and start thinking of our anniversary holiday, but whilst we do that, we suddenly think about how quiet it is tonight!
Well apart from the Wednesday gathering of motor cyclists down at Willingham Woods car park and cafe. We can hear them whining around the local Wolds on their Japanese bikes, the relatively close by open roads are ideal to test the skills and speed of the biker boys, and occasionally through our village at well above 30mph speed limit!
The Lincolnshire road death total is about the same as last year up to the end of June!!

Bird sound is virtually non existent, apart from the dozen or so swifts acting like hooligans, and shrieking around the sky above us taking in the insect life.
No sign of swallows or martins, no song thrush, no blackbird, no sparrows chirping their tuneless tones in our bushes,almost nothing but the occasional monotonous sound of the solo wood pidgeon.
We're not certain if everybody is experiencing the lack of bird life we are, or if it's just personal to us, perhaps a result of our sparrowhawk pair.
We are aware that our feeder seeds are not being eaten at the usual rate, perhaps the birds are in  in the fields?
We start thinking of the last time we saw the hoards of fledgeling sparrow around our pond, and the greenfinches,robins, dunnock, tits and wrens, we've not seen for sometime.
There are plenty of starling in the area, but even they are not doing their night flight as usual, and the pair of linnet visit our pond very quickly before twittering off with there dipping flight.
Something is not right.
I think we(I) may be falling into the anglers trap, no fish so it must be otter, so no birds it's the sparrowhawk...I don't know!
We shall have to see how the rest of the year progresses before jumping to any conclusions, it doesn't seem at all right at the moment though.


40 years of marriage !!

Our anniversary trip was talked about because our Russian visa's turned up this morning.



Our trip will take us to Helsinki where we shall spend 3 nights, we then travel along the coast by train to St Petersburg where we join our "Viking" river boat for a 13 night cruise to Moscow.
No rods will be taken.
I will report on that trip, but somehow I will need to  try and fit in some fishing ,because before our cruise we have a weekend in Milton Keynes for a reunion with my ex Abbey National collegues, a trip to London with the ol'boys of the International Drinking Society, a week near Stirling, and a couple days at the Gunton Arms in Norfolk.
So far, late October to the end of the year are free of away trips.
Perhaps  a trip to the Severn is in order for a try for the zander and barbel......we shall see.