Scarface got to the peanuts first and then a bit of an orderly queue formed behind him:

Just one short minute after he left the scene, this lot piled in, one wearing a lovely fur stole.

The mother badger seems to be relenting a bit these days and letting Scarface join in with the family group more. Here are all five of them at the peanuts last night:

We have this camera – an inspection camera – which is a wire with a camera and a light on the end. It’s waterproof and so we can use it to poke around in the pond, but yesterday we did a tour of our 38 nest boxes to see which ones had nests in. Earlier on in the Spring  there was lots of nesting activity but it got whacked out by severe weather and never seems to have fully recovered. So we were interested to see how things are getting along:

It seems that 9 of the boxes have nests in and all are at the stage of birds on eggs:

So that was very interesting. We will obviously keep an eye on these 9 boxes now to see how things progress.

The first blue butterflies on the wing each year are the Holly blues – they fly much higher than other blue butterflies and, anyway, at this time of year, its only going to be these boys. Also, no trace of orange on the closed wing.

When the sunshine is weak, they occasionally pander to the camera-clad observer by opening their wings. So I could tell that this is a female with the black margins:

They raise their first brood of the year on Holly and the second on Ivy which is somehow very pleasing.

The word has got out around the local pigeon and dove community about the food bonanza going on along the Turtle Dove strip. The record so far is 13 Stock Doves/Wood Pigeon in one shot. I scrutinise each bird for its Turtle Dove-edness but nothing so far.

I think we have nesting Black Caps here because I am seeing a lot of these two:

Oh, and we clearly still have our squirrel living in the Little Owl box: