Rural Life

Just about birds

Last week, after the hunters had been through, we brought the trail camera home to recharge the batteries (rather good - in general they only need doing every couple of months or so), dry it out a bit, and download all the files of what it had recorded.  There were 714 photographs and 713 video streams - that is an awful lot to work through, triage, delete etc.  I download everything onto my desktop computer, clear the SD card (it's a big one, but even so there are limits!), so I can work through everything in slow time (should such a thing ever exist).

I've been through the first 460 photographs in detail, removing a lot that were either nodding bits of vegetation, things were going on beyond the reach of the infrared camera at night, or where the lens had fogged up or frosted up.  In addition, I removed a bunch of not very interesting images as well.  That has still left some 140 images to work with, and that is before I get onto the videos.

Today I have focussed on birds, as there was a lot of bird activity before New Year where the camera was placed.  Next week I will show the animal activity there.  Most varieties were captured more than once by the camera, but the Green Woodpecker only turned up once among the files.

The most persistent visitors were the blackbirds.  I assume it is a breeding pair, but it could have been a whole family - I'm afraid they all look the same to me.  They really do enjoy turning over leaves!

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Another frequent visitor was a thrush - I love them, but don't get to see them, I just hear them and find their anvils surrounded by snail shells, so it is lovely to see them in the feather, so to speak.  If you click on the link, the picture does show up, I've no idea why it doesn't show with the others.

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The male or cock pheasant is a more frequent visitor to the camera - I think he likes to show off - but a hen did come around too for contrast.

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Much more difficult to spot, but very seasonal for when these photos were taken, was a robin that had a good scrummage round the area for a week or two.  He is practically round as it was very cold at that stage.

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So that's your lot for this week, next week I will look at the animals that were operating in that area from mid-November to the 1st January when the camera moved on.  And I will include video too!  Probably

 

There's something in the air!

And it could very well be pollen!  Actually at the start of the week, when it was still cold and a bit frosty, there was also a certain amount of air pollution around too.  But the skies were bright, and while the air was cold, the blue skies and sunshine brought a certain lightness to the heart.  There was a robin singing his heart out in the top of the fig tree (really must bring that down a few meters before the end of March) and snowdrops glistened at the foot of the quince tree.

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Guess what this is?  No, not a dead hedgehog, nor a damp air filter from a lawnmower, nor an exotic mushroom!  It is the seed head from an artichoke that got frosted.  We've left them thus far as the wildlife people say they are interesting to garden birds.  I'm not convinced - the only garden bird that gets interested is Bridie the Freeloading Bantam, and each time she tries a nibble, she wanders off with a really disgusted look on her beak.

Now the weather has changed - we are still plagued by high pressure keeping any real attempt at rain at bay, but it is warmer and the air at altitude is more humid.  There are hints of interesting sunsets, and the warmth is bringing on the spring flowers, including increasing numbers of orchid rosettes.  Today we spotted our first cowslip flowers, while the row of daffodil style flowers are starting to show promising flower buds which are likely to be open by next weekend.

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Apart from broad beans, I know from bitter experience not to get the seed packets out yet awhile, but my mate Loïc at the market at la Flèche sells really good planting shallots, and I can never resist.  So today we pulled up the Brussel sprout plants - John will be munching his way through the few that we grew, while the chickens will get the rest - and I hoed and turned the soil lightly so that it was no longer solid clay.  I also picked out loads of bits of old masonry, which will do as crocks at the bottom of a toilet cistern I plan to sow carrots in next month.  I then carefully planted as many as I could in the space freed up - 14!  The other 10 will need to find a home elsewhere.  The trouble is I was greedy and picked out the biggest, fattest bulbs I could find, and when planting them, they told me they needed lots of space.  The rest of the bed will have red and yellow onions in, which take up less space, and won't be planted for a good month yet.

The broad beans are coming on nicely, while the cauliflowers are being munched by caterpillars.  The leeks will be eaten in the coming weeks and there is a bit of turning to do after which I may well replant the pea towers.

No images from the trail camera this week.  I will be moving it during the week, as today I got some fine footage of marauding hunters, so a lot of things will be hiding or will have moved on.  I am ambivalent about the hunters, as boar are far too numerous, but the way the hunters waltz through our land with dogs off the leash, when we have three resident cats, hacks me off too.  Next week, I hope to have as yet unseen photos and footage for you - but given there are 1,400 unreviewed files on the SD card, it could take a while and be a bit time consuming, and there are other priorities at the moment in our lives.

 

Animals, and the challenge of being a trail camera

After last week's unabashedly food oriented post, it's back to what people seem to be interested in - animals!

The trail camera was at the side of a patch of scrub during December, which brought a lot of "exciting" footage of blackbirds and thrushes turning over leaves, the odd sighting of the pine martin and badgers, but the main visitor was a hare who has a lair somewhere in the brambles and whose front path came out by the camera.  They are such beautiful creatures!

Anyway, fickle me got bored with blackbirds so I moved the trail camera to by a couple of ponds that are at the bottom of the Orchard, and for a couple of weeks got nothing more exciting than a hunter's bottom (fully clothed I hasten to add), so I moved the camera a short way along the path and waited.  Once again I got a fine shot and video of a passing hunter - I really do need to put a warning sign up that they are being filmed.  It won't stop them coming through but they can't sue me if I post the film; currently they could.

Anyway, despite the hunters passing through during daylight hours, the boar are knocking around at night time.

The deer are also around and pass through singly or in pairs.

 

The badgers trundle through - now picking off my phone the videos I want to download isn't easy, and while there is some nice footage, there is some of a limping badger that I wanted to share and this isn't it, but frankly sometimes life is too short on a Sunday!

I hinted that the life of a trail camera isn't totally easy.  Ours is currently a challenge to a Great Tit, and keeps getting investigated and attacked by that.  Have the sound up if you can too!

And given the fact that the camera is a good meter or more off the ground, if it had been a bit lower, it might not have survived this encounter either!

More excitement from the trail camera next week!

 

Truffle time

If you aren't interested in food, today's contribution is not for you!  

Every year, from early January and depending on prices and what is going on, John buys 100g of black truffle for me to "play" with.  He uses Ebay to find a supplier, and if we like their product, we stay faithful for a year or two.  The bloke that sent us a photo of the dog that found the truffles was a favourite for about 3 years I think!  Generally they come from the south west of France, although there are truffle woods around here and a truffle fair each year at Chinon.  This year we were a bit later than usual buying our black gold as I had a trip to the UK earlier in the month, but the parcel arrived on the 23rd of January with these gems.

The first thing I do is set some to infuse in cheese - this year's choice was a quarter of a Brillat Saverin, a mild cheese that we generally find fairly pointless, unless it is to take on truffle aroma.  I also mixed some pieces into cream cheese and sealed that in a yoghurt pot for a few days.

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The first meal was the classic - scrambled eggs with truffle shards sprinkled over them.  The scrambled eggs are a silly colour because our chickens produce dayglo yellow egg yolks.

The second meal was another classic - linguine with a cream sauce infused with cèpe and truffle flakes.  I added the smoked salmon as I had a slice that I had got from the fish monger before the truffles arrived and it needed to be used up.  Happily, it didn't overwhelm the sauce.

The Wednesday meal was fish based, as I had been to the market that morning - a nice piece of cod filet, pan fried, with a beurre blanc sauce and slices of truffle.  There were crudités to provide a hint of healthy bits too.

By the Thursday evening, the truffle infused cream cheese was just right for a dip with aperos before dinner.  I then topped up the pot with more cream cheese to get another go at it!

Thursday dinner was a sumptuous roast chicken leg served with truffle mash - one of the very few dishes where the truffle gets cooked as it is so well encased in mashed potato.

Friday we had a day off from truffle, but Saturday night was an interesting one.  My brother had given me a couple of merguez crepinettes - for those not in the know, merguez are a beef and/or lamb sausage well spiced with paprika, while a cripinette is a sort of flat sausage encased in crepine, or the membrane of an internal organ of a pig.  We had the other half of the truffle mash too, and were worried that the meat would be too strong for the mash, but they made an excellent mix.

Sunday lunch is normally eggs in some form after a morning of labour or leisure at The Shack.  For the truffle fest, I did baked eggs with truffle slices hidden under the eggs, so another of the few times the truffle actually gets cooked, but again trying to keep the aromas in with a coating of egg, cream and mild cheese.  It worked!

Sunday dinner was another classic - pan fried scallops with truffle.  To celebrate scallops, I dug up four leeks from The Garden and cooked them down with stock, before adding a swirl of cream and pepper to the final mix.  They made a wonderful bed and foil to the scallops - that was memorable!

On the Monday, as I was in Baugé, I stopped at the market and got a pork loin from the butcher.  This enabled me to do slices of pork loin with spaghetti and a cream and truffle sauce which was a particularly lush start to a new week.

The next lunchtime we finished off the truffle infused cheeses as the Brillat Saverin was starting to climb out of the cheese box - not in a smelly way, just getting jolly runny.

The week of truffle greed ended with the second half of the pork loin, cut into medallions and pan fried, and served with a rich mushroom risotto, all liberally festooned with the final slivers of truffle.

So there you have it - 8 days of truffle heaven, which won't be repeated in 2023, so roll on 2024!  I should also add that there is a real art to photographing food, which includes the right lighting and the food not being hot.  But scrub around that - I remembered to take a snap before wading into dinner and that is the most I can promise!

Next week there should be animal videos.