Startling berries

Very busy and productive day. After breakfast we we about to leave the house when I heard an animal in the chimney. We removed the draught blocking panel and found nothing, so we assumed it had flown/climbed away or died...

We then went down to "Little Meadow" where we we doing some general maintenance. We divided the snow drops which have done very well this year and last. We trimmed the hedge so that the man with the mower can get round it. We scalped a circle of meadow to plant field poppy seeds to commemorate the start of the first world war. Today's blip is of some Guelder Rose berries before they got trimmed back.

We then returned home to find that the animal was still in the chimney, so we opened the windows and tried to encourage it out. A sooty and startled starling shot out and managed to find an open window. It looked a bit dazed but seemed to fly away under it's own steam.

We then went down to Lymington in the New Forest to see the plans of the West Solent Co-operative to develop a solar farm on the site of a disused gravel quarry. I'm not convinced by solar farms on good agricultural land, but in this case it's a brown field site, and they are putting in a lot of mitigation to try and restore the local biodiversity.

After talking to them we pottered about Lymington for a while and nipped into the Waitrose to get some bits and bobs while we were there. We made it home in the early evening, had our pizza and then watched the next two episodes of BBC4's foreign detective show "Salamander".

(back blip)