What a week weather wise! I don’t know if you’ve had floods, freezing temperatures, driving wind & rain where you live, but we certainly have up here in Northumberland. The crops are soggy and battered whereas last year they were droughted off and suffering with extreme heat. We’re hoping that the weather will stabilise a little this week so we can make our haylage crop for Winter horse fodder for our Livery stables, but there again we hoped we could do that three weeks ago. The gardens are so green & the water baths for the birds most definitely have not needed filling, although the keeping the feeders filled has been a constant job. I’ve been watching soggy little sparrows just out of the nest lining up at our bird table (thankfully a covered one) being shown by the adult where the easiest grub is. The poor birds were struggling to...

We all remember the Beast from the East, the snow that visited us early in March and then repeated its visit a couple of weeks later.  Now we seem to be plagued by torrential rain and cold weather so that Spring feels far away still, but hopefully this weekend will see an upturn in temperatures for the whole of the UK. The RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch seems such a long time ago after all of our extreme weather since then, but, trumpet fanfare, the results are in......pause for effect,  More than 420,000 people completed the count and 6.7 million birds were recorded.  Its good news for the blue tit (pictured) as their numbers are up by 5% but the winner seems to be the goldfinch with recorded numbers up by 11%. The long tailed tit and coal tit are also up in numbers, perhaps helped by the milder temperatures before...