Friday, April 8, 2011

A New Visitor

When I'm not knitting or battling with the housework I inexpertly garden.  There's a lot of garden to keep tidy and it does tend toward the slightly wild.  To be honest, I find a touch of wilderness far more soothing than I ever would a pristinely neat garden with immaculately laid out beds and perfectly trimmed hedges and shrubs.  I've realised that my imperfections as a a gardener aren't such a bad thing though; I enjoy watching a host of wild visitors, some regulars and others more seasonal, and I'm sure if things were to perfectly maintained we'd see far fewer.

The bulk of our visitors are feathered, though Yona visits every night, actually the bulk of visitors would be insects but the birds are more obvious most of the time.  We had a new visitor this morning;  bold as brass, strutting about on the patio, seemingly taunting the feline audience on the indoor side of the glass, a normally shy and retiring bird... a Hawfinch.  I was amazed!  I thought I'd lived here long enough to be familiar with all our visitors, so it's always exciting to see a new one, but to see a Hawfinch less than a foot away from me with only a pane of glass between us was totally beyond expectation.  I've seen Hawfinches before but never so close up; I'm hoping he becomes a more regular visitor.

p.s. if you've not read Watership Down, Yona is a hedgehog.

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