It's been a relatively quiet week, as Autumn slowly does its thing. In the garden, the cyclamen flowers are disappearing and great tufts of leaves are taking over, to feed the corms for next year - it has been a riot this year. In the One Acre Wood, the white cyclamen are slower to come through, and the light is very different of course. Still we have some 14 flowering zones (one of which isn't strictly in our bit of wood), and there will be a lot more clumps of leaves than that, when they really start to show. It would appear that a cyclamen needs at least three years from germinating to getting to the flowering stage. It is worth thinking about that, when you buy disposable pots of cyclamen as presents for people I think. The most magnificent flowering has been quite hidden from us until a bit of judicious strimming cleared access to part of the orchard where they seem to have gone totally crazy!
The weather has wavered between nice sunny days, warm enough to lie out on the hammock (modelled here by Monsieur Clause), and dull, dreary, grey and wet days, when the only useful thing to do has been to sit in my office area, do filing and throw out 30 year old insurance documents.
Some of the filing has been positively pleasurable though - 2018 files from a trail camera need a lot of pruning down to the bits that are worth hanging on to. There is no point in trying to make a paradise for wildlife if one also clogs up a datacentre with unnecessary and rather poor quality photos and videos! There was a rather nice image of the hare making a very rare appearance this year.
But badgers do not make good photo subjects in general, as they are out and about at night and tend to move quite quickly - this is a better example than most, but it isn't really worth keeping!
The video shorts of badgers were much more amusing though, and I was able to take time to load quite a few onto YouTube to share here.
This is much more amusing!
This one has two badgers going about their legal and lawful.
As does this one.
The quality of this video is dire I admit, but it did prove that once again we had a faun in the Meadow this year. The weather wasn't great over the summer, with cool mornings so the misted up camera was a fairly regular thing.
We had to wait another 12 days to get better visual confirmation that the pair were in the zone, and by that time the faun had grown a lot! Also, they weren't that close to the camera.
The clocks have now gone back - fallen for the Anglophones (Fall - fall back - go back). The French mnemonic is that in Octobre the clocks reculent. For a couple of weeks we will be getting up in daylight again, but not for long. By December it will still be dark at 8:30am and the temptation to stay in bed on grey days will be almost too much!
Have a good week!
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