New Year snow

Like a lot of other people we are snowbound with more frozen days to come. A few hardy (or foolhardy) souls have attempted to drive into the valley with predictable results: going downhill is easy with gravity but getting back up a one-in-six gradient is altogether a different matter.

Not much visible wildlife other than a few hungry robins (fatballs are popular) but a lot of tracks in the snow - one of them a boar badger with feet like a yeti. At least you can see which setts are occupied.

Before the freeze we had a visitation of well over fifty fieldfares in the orchard. They had a banquet on rotting apples. This lead to a lot of shouting at each other and a drunken brawl between two males, feathers flying. Most years the same thing occurs with the ducks in the carpark by the river. Since then the only bird life of note has been one of the ravens flying low and trying to avoid being mobbed by the rooks, and the resident buzzard crossly leaving its branch on the drive whenever someone walks up there.