Where?  There on the stair patio!

Bold as brass, this little fellow came out to ‘tidy up’ after the collared doves had kicked a lot of grain off the feeding station, despite the fact that OH was sitting watching him with the conservatory door wide open, only about two yards away.  I guess he was hungry!

Basically, this is the reason we stopped feeding the dogs outside; we are right on the edge of the village next to a field where grain crops are regularly planted and there are always mice and rats nearby.  One day, I caught a glimpse through the window of a cheeky little mouse sitting in one of the dogs’ bowls, finishing up the last scraps of their dinner.  Since more than 50% of rodents in the UK carry leptospirosis (a bacterial disease which attacks the liver and causes jaundice), I didn’t think this was a good idea.

So we stopped feeding the dogs outside, and for a while, we stopped feeding the birds, too.

But as you see, they’re still around.

They’re fascinating little creatures.  One of our sons used to keep them as pets and of course, it soon became my job to clean them out and feed them – and on one memorable occasion soon after we bought them, to treat them for mange.  Imagine having to dip two wriggling, squirming little mice in a bath of insecticidal solution every few day?  They are really, really good at hanging by their tails and contorting themselves so that no part of their little bodies enters the water!

And my, aren’t they fast?

Don’t you just love the way this one is turning on the spot so fast that only his little pink foot is in any kind of focus?  Sweet!

I don’t mind them too much, because a) you can’t keep them out of the garden anyway and b) our dogs are always vaccinated against lepto.

Just as long as they don’t come in the house.

Because if they do, I still have the set of humane mouse traps left over from the days before we had all the ground level floors concreted and all the odd holes around pipes mended.

Ooops!  Looks like he may have heard me!

So tell me; how do YOU feel about mice?

Sunday Selections is a great meme, and I’ve been neglecting it. I thought I’d better do something about that!

Now. I dunno about you, but I’m pretty warm right now. The weather here in England is hot and humid, and I don’t like it. So, with apologies to those of you ‘Down Under’, who are experiencing winter right now, I bring you some nice cooling, snow and ice shots. Enjoy!

These were taken at various times and locations during 2010 and early 2011. This first one is from my mother’s garden and was taken last year.

Mum loved to feed the birds, but by December last year, she quite sensibly wouldn’t risk walking out in the snow and ice at ninety years old to clear the feeding stations. She’d wait until my brother or sister-in-law went round and ask them to do it for her. So for that day, the birds had to find their scraps on her doorstep and scrabble in the snow for them!

It was a very hard winter. This one was taken at a local wildlife and dog-walking area known as Cuckoo Hollow (even though someone in the council has put ‘Cuckoo’s Hollow’ on the noticeboard). The ducks, geese, moorhens and swans had a tough time.

A lot of the lakes froze over completely and stayed that way for a long time, so the wind whipped particles of snow and iced them up around the little birds’ footprints.

Here are some of the little darlings -

I took along some grain for them one day. Many people bring bread for them, but grain is better. I took a wild bird mix, and what they didn’t eat, I’m sure the little song birds and sparrows would have cleaned up later.

Because the snow and ice came early that year, it was a great opportunity to photograph some colourful leaves lying on top of the crust.

You can see how we had repeated thaw and freeze, too, with the drops from overhanging branches pitting the snow .. which then froze again.

And then of course, the catkins appeared in the spring and we had another light snowfall and plenty of ice.

Well, I hope you all feel cooler now. Quite refreshing from a distance, isn’t it?

Oh, and you people in the Southern Hemisphere, who might possibly be experiencing sub-zero temperatures of your own, console yourselves with how very grey our English snow pictures can be, compared to the bright, blue-shadowed, high contrast productions from kinder regions! Or perhaps you can simply refect on how, when you are enjoying the other kind of bright blue days, we’ll once again be wallowing in the grip of our grey and dismal winter!

Kim of Frog Ponds Rock has lots more Sunday Selections for you. Go take a look!

Ah, this is fun! I get to dig out a few almost-forgotten pictures which I’ve always meant to post in some form or other, and you get another insight into the dark mysteries of my psyche!

For Sunday Selections this week, I thought I’d find you some insect photos, and I thought I’d start with a pretty one or you’d all run away screaming. It’s a lacewing fly – a beneficial insect since they are voracious predators of greenfly. See? It’s even a gorgeous emerald green so they can’t see it creeping up on them – clever, huh?

Now, these pictures were each given a little filter treatment to bring out some aspect of their … um … personalities or characteristics. The lacewing was done with a dry brush filter plus ‘angled strokes’ to try to emphasise the delicacy of their bodies and wings. Look at his little copper eyes! Aren’t they sweet? I photographed him inside a lightbox, which I think works quite well, since the texture of the background seems to fit with the gauzy theme.

Here’s another green fly, this one a little less lovable.

This is Lucilia Caesar, otherwise known as a greenbottle. He’s a degrader, of course. He doesn’t catch and eat other creatures, but he’ll demolish them once they’re dead. We need degraders, or the world would be full of dead bodies, now, wouldn’t it? You don’t have to like them particularly (although he is a beautiful shade of metallic green) but they are useful. This one is making a meal of some left-over dog food.

For this little buzzer, I used a heavy ‘poster edges’ filter, to bring out the dark side of his nature.

Who is this?

Well, I confess I don’t know. I found him on a wall in Italy, he’s a member of the Orthoptera order of insects, and I’m thinking he’s a locust. They’ve been having trouble with them in the vineyards lately, I’m told. He was filtered with a very fine posterise filter, which I think did a nice job on the stippled plasterwork and kept the detail in the insect. Whatever he is.

Pretty though, isn’t he? No, I didn’t squash him (or maybe her), so you can blame me if you’re a couple of grapes short of a Barbera for your Sunday lunch.

Hmm. Who’s next?

Well, I almost hate to do it to you, but I’m going to finish with a rather nice Common Cross garden spider.

I was pleased with this shot. It was taken through the garage window, from the inside. I was able to actually lean the camera on the glass to steady it (giving myself a horrible crick in the neck in the process) and use a macro setting which blurred the background beautifully. Look at the delicate scribbly lacework of that web!

I used the plain ‘posteriser’ again for this one, but a little more of it. I think it brings out the detail in the arachnid beautifully, while further blurring out the background. It’s kept her sharp and dangerous-looking, and shows the white cross which gives this spider her name.

But hey – do you want to be overrun with flies, midges and mosquitoes?

Of course you don’t!

Pop on over to Frog Ponds Rock for more photos! Chances are there’ll be quite a lot without spiders in them!

As some of you will know, OH and I have been away from home for a fortnight – so first of all, apologies for not getting around the blogosphere and answering comments, visiting your blogs, etc. When you are travelling, you might have a connection, but it might not actually work very well, and to be frank, I wasn’t about to waste too much time in front of a computer when I could have been out practising my atrocious Italian on the local population.

So (I hear you cry), ‘Where have you been?‘

Well, I’ll tell you, although that ‘practising my Italian’ bit up there is a bit of a clue! Yes, we’ve been to Italy! Starting with a wonderful little agriturismo high in the hills above La Spezia. And this little track is the road to Locanda del Papa, a family home guest house run by Davide, his wife Roberta, and his father, Guiliano.

We arrived at dusk, having driven up from Pisa airport, and it’s just as well we had Susan* with us, I can tell you. Even then, we had to stop and ask directions from two lovely local ladies who did their best to overcome the language barrier caused by one Englishwoman with a little Italian, and two Italians with just about enough English to argue with each other and me … but they did point us in the right direction, and eventually Susan found the village of La Foce, and the sign that said ‘Locanda del Papa’.

Imagine pointing the nose of your car up a steep, muddy track, just wide enough for the car, and with just enough light to see the precipitous drop on one side disappearing into the fog – or was it low cloud? Later, we were to see this -

- which wasn’t at all comforting. Ah well. Holidays are all about adventure, aren’t they? What – you know another kind?

Talking of adventure, while having breakfast on our first morning we were startled to hear a loud droning coming from the chimney, about a foot behind me. Davide saw me looking and said cheerfully ‘Oh, it’s just the hornets. They get sleepy at this time of year and fall down the chimney’. Later we found one of these things crawling across the patio.

I tell you, it was over an inch long – in other words, huge! Just compare the tile size with the previous picture, also taken on the patio area. But they didn’t seem at all aggressive, which was just as well, since I’ve heard that their sting has been likened to a snake bite.

Don’t let this put you off staying at the Locanda del Papa though. It really is a great place, and Davide and his family are wonderful hosts. We thoroughly recommend it, and if we were going to the same area again, we’d definitely go back. The rooms are spotless, and beautifully decorated in the Italian farmhouse style, the food was perfect, and the extremely good wine which we were offered was made by Davide’s family from their own grapes. They really are excellent hosts.

The local La Foce restaurants were excellent, and the people very kind and patient with my limited Italian, and my multiple allergies, and though we weren’t at all struck with the city of La Spezia, the Cinque Terre were just up the road a bit, as were Lerici and Portovenere … and I’ll tell you about those another time.

* Susan is our faithful TomTom GPS unit.