I should never doubt our sons good eyesight, but I was rather surprised when he said he had just seen a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker on the peanuts, as they are not nearly as common as their cousins, the Great Spotted. We have seen the odd one or two in the garden over the years, but they are rather shy birds and spend most of their time high in the tree tops; not on peanut feeders. The next day we had just settled down for our elevenses when I glanced across to the peanuts just as the Lesser Spotted arrived on them. I was amazed just how small he was, about the size of a house sparrow, with bright red cap and black and white bars right across his back. We always have binoculars on the coffee table and so we were both able to get really good views of him while he enjoyed the feast of nuts. The Great Spotted is a regular visitor to the nuts and his body is roughly the same size as the feeder but this bird was only a third as tall as the tube. When I have seen them before, they have always been in the tops of trees, and I had not realised just how small they are. This one was definitely a male, with his lovely red cap; the female is white on top. Our son, of course, said, ‘I told you so when he returned from school!
A little bit of overnight snow showed us just what had been going on in the garden during the night, and it seems as if our place is a foxs playground. Amazingly I still have two bantams, but I wonder for how long? All of the lawns were criss-crossed with fox tracks, right up to the terrace, and several had been around the new orchard where the bantams live. There were foxes with big feet and some with small feet, no tussock of grass went unsniffed and no corner unexamined.
My father built our sheep a smart little shed ‘for the cold nights, but there were six oval patches without snow in the deep run and six sheep with snow on their back when I fed them this morning. Some sheep are just downright ungrateful! Still, they did have a choice, and I suppose half an inch of snow is nothing compared with Shetland conditions.