Saturday 19 December 2009
We had snow yesterday!!! OK I admit that it was only for about five minutes, but it was snow. I was relieved that it did not come down in piles because of the owl evenings, Sunday it can do the job properly! But LOOK at our website, we have snow there too! Linda got ambitious and is smartening up the website and making it look great, with dropdown menus, which everyone including me prefers, but now we have a festive front page, have a look, she is such a star!I have this morning come to the conclusion that I am very glad I am not a duck, regardless of what my Christian name implies. It might be fun to be a duck in the summer, after all I am a Piscean and therefore a child of water, which I love, but to be swimming round all night to keep a bit of the pond from freezing over, hummmmm not so much fun after all. It was a glorious early Saturday morning, the sky is clear clear and clean and very cold! The wind has dropped which was a blessing for the owl evening last night. The one on Thursday went very well and it was lovely to see the volunteers that got here for it, but the wind made standing still pretty unpleasant as it cut through you! Last night although very cold was easier to deal with without the wind. The owls really have been going very well too, although Cool Ground (snowy owl) is still inclined to bump into things, he is too busy looking over his shoulder and not where he is going!
My Christmas tree is in the house, much to the interest of the puppies, I have not decorated it yet, that is to come and I can’t remember if I gave away all my Christmas lights before I went to the US, so I have to see if I can find them, they, like all my stuff have been packed away since October 2004.
The aviaries are coming on a treat, they are going to look very good and I will be very relieved when the Hawk Walk is the closed Courtyard that it always was before I left. We have nearly undone all the damage of the last four years, it will be nice to actually move forward and not just catch up. The baby owls are doing well and the Griffon Vultures have two nest ledges which they now like and are starting to play with the nesting material. So hopefully a baby Griffon Vulture will arrive next year, they have bred before, so its just a matter of getting it right for them.
And………..a beautiful pair of Golden Eagles arrived yesterday, they belong to Donald Anderson and he and his wife have kindly let them come here on breeding loan, so we are hoping that they will breed, possibly even this year, which would be wonderful. Simon collected them and luckily the trip was not affected by any snowfall. The team here cleaned the whole of the eagle barn so that the birds were not unduly disturbed while settling in. They came out of their boxes very sensibly and the male was very good and went straight up to the high perches, the female did too, but was so excited by being up high that she came down again and took ages to work out how to get up to the top, she needs to be a little fitter – I know the feeling!
We are only flying the owls at the moment, the rest of the flyers are in the Indoor Hawk Walk, I took the young male Lugger down to the field on Thursday and, poor thing, he just sat there and shivered, so we left rapidly!! We will get them back in the swing of things next week if it warms up, which I think it is supposed to.
It’s the last owl evening tonight, which is sort of a relief, they are great fun to do, but it is also nice to not have to do them! We have two more in February and then that is it until next winter. All the owls will be fed tons of food tonight as they finish the flying demonstrations and I am sure they will be delighted.
Richard is going to fix all the light pulls, which will be great as the one in the downstairs loo is a pain and keeps making me jump when it finally decides to come on.
My new big axe is very good, fairly creams through the logs! Great fun although I have to persuade the puppies not to try and help, they make it a little hazardous!
Oh and if anyone has a vacuum cleaner that actually sucks properly, and which they don't need, the lads need one in the flats - and then they will have NO excuse not to be squeekly clean!
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