It's been a wet week and tomorrow is due to be the same. it has severely curtailed what I wanted to do outdoors - there are parsnips that need to be lifted and eaten, but frankly neither yesterday or today were conducive to anything other than a quick trot around to top up the bird feeder and check on the level of the ponds. We've had a lot of rain. The Couasnon - our local small river - is full and moving much more quickly than usual, while fields and ditches have sprung streams and ponds. You can see sometimes where a helpful ditch has been ploughed over as it once again runs with water, heading for an ancestral pond.
I'm not actually too upset about the rain on one level as the ponds are slowly refilling, particularly the upper one. Today it was just an inch or so below the level of the overflow pipe, which is the best I've seen for a couple of years. The lower pond is also refilling, and now we wait to see if the clay has expanded enough and there is enough debris to block where that one has been draining away. Today for the first time in ages, it was at the level it was when we first found it three years ago.
Thursday and Friday we had Storm Louis, who came in with strong winds and left about 32mm of rain, and since then we have had unnamed depressions with abrupt sharp showers, or just interminable wet grey as per this morning. Friday afternoon was occasionally dry, and when it was, the skies were dramatic.
This wet weather left me with too much time on my hands. After a long drawn out and heated discussion with the suppliers of my (non-functioning) trail camera over whether I understood how to use it properly and of course it was normal that it heated up to 55ºC and batteries only lasted 8 hours, I got frustrated. So I spent time looking for another camera not supplied by that bunch, but that met at least 75% of my requirements (taking photos, taking videos, using rechargeable batteries, working, and WiFi or Bluetooth enabled), I settled on a pack of three cameras which are quite basic and don't do WiFi or Bluetooth but do take rechargeable batteries, and with three of them I can cover two places and have one in reserve to swap in and out. I hope they will arrive during the week, and then I can get monitoring again - the hares, the deer, the boar, the pheasants, the badgers, the pine martens, I've missed them all these last 4 months, not forgetting Monsieur and Madame Woodpecker.
A pine marten from last year to illustrate the point!
In my post Changes for the New Year, I shared a photo of one of the chickens (Jaq) suffering a particularly drastic moult. It has taken a while, but she is now back to full featherhood and looking much better I am pleased to say. Perhaps she might even deign to lay an egg one of these days!
The other thing that took a lot of my time and attention last week was preparing for and then submitting to my five yearly colon examination. It's a boring process, a bit icky if I'm honest, and I craved food with crunch or crumbs or crust, and I did pay for a private room. It is important none the less to do those regular cancer checks, because caught early, many things are eminently treatable, and the tests are likely much less invasive than the treatment! There we go - sermon over!
So I leave you with an image of a fairly full second pond, and hope that your feet stay dry and unwebbed!
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