Swans and Sunsets at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve

Last Sunday I went for a walk around Rye Harbour Nature Reserve at the end of the day. The timing was perfect for a great sunset!

The lakes are now filled with Swans:

And ducks, such as this pair of Gadwalls - first time I've ever seen these!

Here's the female Gadwall on her own:

And the male Gadwall:

I was pleased to get a shot of a Cormorant flying overhead, though the light was fading a bit by this point:

It's all a far cry from what it was like back in May:

There's still a lot of birds around, but it's much more peaceful now.

Going back to the sunsets, I'll finish with a few more of my favourites...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Building a firewood store: part 3

A while ago I posted pictures of the construction of our firewood store (part 1 and part 2), but we've made one more small addition to it.

We found that although rain dripping off the lower edge of the roof was well clear of the wood stored inside, the splashes when the drips landed were making the wood wet. So, we've added a gutter, suspended from the roof slats by short lengths of paracord:

We may add something to collect the rainwater from it later, but at present we're getting more than enough from the house roof.

We then went up to the wood to do the same to the shelter that EWB had built for us back in March, but this time we definitely wanted to harvest the rainwater so we can use it for the fruit trees in the summer. So, we got hold of a couple of old dustbins from Freecycle, and cut a hole in the lid:

and then fitted in the downpipe. We wanted a lid on to prevent wildlife falling in and drowning.

While we were up there, we also stripped off the plastic from roof of our old firewood shelter, as it was degrading from UV exposure, and replaced it with a tarpaulin and some old corrugated plastic we had spare. We'll do something more permanent with roof felt later I think, but this is an improvement for now:

and finally, we went for a bike ride (in the drizzle) this morning to try and video some herons down near Military Road. We didn't see any herons, but we did get a nice video of some swans feeding:

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Photos from Rye Harbour Nature Reserve

We wandered along the side of the River Brede the other evening, and got lots of pictures of the wildlife. Here you go...

A coot, with its chicks in one of the reed-filled drainage ditches:
A black-headed gull taking off
and one chasing another:
A sawn, searching for food on the bottom of the river:
One of the hundreds of lambs:
accompanied by numerous rabbits:
The view back to Rye:
Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.