The last few days have been gorgeous, today, in particular, was lovely and warm with clear blue skies. In the last week or so the snowdrops have given way to the daffodils and today I saw the first celandines in flower.
The willow trees are just coming into bud and today I pottered about my patch looking to increase the amount of wet woodland. The willows I planted a few years ago to thicken the wood have taken well and so I took 7 or 8 good branches about a metre long and pushed them into the soft ground to extend coverage across the front. It's very easy to propagate willows in this way, obviously, this is not a genetically diverse way of doing it but the premise of more to develop wet and fallen wood stock in the area, which in turn will be great for insects and subsequently birds.
With the high winds over the last winter a couple of the Alders are a little worse for wear and they do not seem to be being replaced in the stock. There are plenty of 20-30 and older Alders on my page along the backwater but I cannot think of a single young tree or sapling coming through. There are plenty of dead trees which the woodpeckers love but slowly they are falling (which I leave in place). I think this year I may buy and plant a few Alders if I can find a suitable stockist.
Moving away from the plants the Roe Deer were about again, just the usual three and I m constantly amazed at how quickly they can blend into the background.
Given how mild the winter has been this year I was not expecting many of the winter visiting finches but this weekend saw several flocks of Siskin and Lesser Redpoll. The Redpoll were still on site today and I managed to get a shot of this handsome fellow.
There are still plenty of signs of Otter, in fact yesterday I found a new otter spraint in a very different location. I have noticed that the otters on otter cam like to climb on a fallen log and spraint there. When at the far end of the meadow I found a spraint a good metre off the ground on a horizontal branch.
In the first photo, you can see the distinctive fish scales and the second shows the branch on which it was left, quite a height off the ground. I m guessing that this stops and floodwater washing away the mark? I perhaps should have given it a smell just to check its origin, something to check out next time.
