Garden visitors

I've got very little of interest to show you workwise at present. It's not that I don't have some new bags - I do. I have some lovely new bags using vintage materials all sitting finished and ready. What I don't have is any decent photos of them so I can neither show them here nor list them in my online shops.


Asthma is causing me to have great problems holding the camera steady enough to take an in-focus shot. Even with my wee tripod, pressing the shutter release is shaky when my breathing is out of whack, and boy, is it out of whack this week! The inhaler gives me the shakes, I shake as I'm coughing. Basically I'm unable to take a decent photo for the time being.


Anyway, this is out of focus, for the same reasons and also because I've zoomed in to get as close an image as I could and also because it was taken through the kitchen window. I was kneeling on the kitchen floor so I could rest my elbows on the sink unit to take photos of the acrobatics a squirrel was performing to get to the fat balls, and realised that there was something in FRONT of the squirrel, on a large fat filled pine cone on a stand....


Wow.

It's an adult female great spotted woodpecker. Now, these aren't rare in the UK, but it's rare for us to have one on a bird feeder in our garden! We hear them all the time, as we're only about 20m from the start of the woodland.

This particular lady yesterday decided that taking the food to the baby was too much trouble and brought the baby to the food instead. The youngster is now happily coming to and fro on its own, perfecting the art of perching on things and righting itself when it tips over and finds itself upside down. We haven't seen mama for a day now so I suspect that baby's on its own now. It's pretty much the same size as the adult was anyway, so it must have been close to separation.

So far it's very very cautious and we've only been able to look and photograph through a window. The smallest sound sets it off and it swoops off back to the wood.

Beautiful, huh?