Woodpeckers
are woodpeckers on the increase? I’d never seen one ’till a few years ago, and now I see them in my garden nearly every day. It’s a green woodpecker, and is very noisy. I’m sure there’s more than one as I see it so often. At the stone yard, birds can be a bit of a problem, as they tend to ‘bomb’ the stone that we are working on outside. It doesn’t hurt the stone, but in the Spring, when the starlings are nesting in the workshop roof (which they do every year) then the parents seem to drop a ‘bomb’ on everytrip to and from the nest, and you can come back in the morning and find your stone fireplace covered in multi-coloured bird poo! Not nice!
It’s normally easy to clean off though, just blast the stone fireplaces off with a hose pipe and maybe a stiff brush and it’s all gone.
Anyway, despite birds’ apparent disregard for stone fireplaces. It is great to see previously rare birds in the garden, and I take it as a sign that we’re not completely destroying their habitats with our modern agriculture and construction. We also have a thriving colony of grass snakes in the rough ground at the rear of the stone yard. We sometimes see some very large ones and they are a bit scary. Not that they would attack, but if one shot out from under a stone fireplace that you were moving it would really make you jump! They can grow to nearly 2 metres long, and I wouldn’t want to find that under anything!!!