Food for migrants...

I woke up with a headache and sore throat - not a good state to be in when I was supposed to be driving down to Cambridge for a meeting. Outside there was dense, freezing fog which sapped my enthusiasm even further. I dragged myself out of bed, dosed myself with ibuprofen, made a pot of spiced pumpkin soup and then delivered Alex to Orton Pit for a day of scrub clearance. I felt a bit sorry for him - he looked a little the worse for wear after a night out on the town!

I'd been planning to carry straight on to Cambridge, but the fog was so bad that I decided to return home to see whether it would lift and whether the painkillers would kick in. After an hour or so the weather had improved but I hadn't, so I decided to give the meeting a miss. Instead I went for a gentle walk round Ferry Meadows with Rosie, had lunch, and then retreated to bed for an hour or so and watched a couple of comedy episodes on the iPad. It felt thoroughly decadent!

About twenty years ago the Nene Park Trust stopped mowing one of the areas that we walk through, and it's now a complicated mosaic of rough grass and scrub, predominantly hawthorn and wild rose. At the moment there's a huge crop of berries, which have attracted a large mixed flock of redwings and fieldfares. They're very flighty, but I love to watch them flitting through the bushes and then wheeling overhead to land somewhere out of sight, even though there's little chance of a good photograph. The more mature hawthorns are developing an impressive encrustation of lichen, mostly pollution tolerant species of Xanthoria and Physcia. However, when we first moved to the county there were extremely very few tree-dwelling lichens, and their appearance is visible confirmation of an overall improvement in air quality.