A Crèche at the window

Walking Monday:   3.8km

Walking Tuesday:   3.9km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.25km

Walking Wednesday: 3.8km

Walking Thursday:  3.9km

Walking Friday:       3.8km

Swimming Friday:   1.30km

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"You've had an assassin here"

Gérard is very protective about his work. Although he installed the zinc down pipes on the gutter of the hanger and left me to dig and fit the drains he still feels it necessary to lift the inspection covers in passing to check that my drains are handling his beloved top water properly. Talk of assassins naturally makes us think of the cats, Spring is a cornucopia for them on our land, lairs of mice, voles, lots of moles and, of course, birds' nests. Normally the birds are a step or four ahead of the cats but youngsters leaving the nest lack the knowledge of adult birds .....

Back to Gérard. He had a small wet and long dead bundle of feathers in his hand that he'd recovered from my inspection chamber. I showed him where the Mésonge (Blue Tit) nest had been, "Must have got up on the roof, looked for shelter in the gutter and fallen down the pipe". It partly answered what had happened to the clutch of noisy birds who had hatched in our nest box; we had taken down the box and found two birds who hadn't made it out of the nest, some juvenile feathers on the drive pointed to another one or two that hadn't got far, we'd seen the parents feeding two or possibly three in the oak trees and now this one.

The warm weather this week meant that we have been having breakfast outside on the terrace and this let us observe another remarkable sight also linked to Gérard. On the zinc window sill bavette he had fitted were a family of young swallows:

I managed to get up into our bedroom and catch some pictures of them from inside the glass.

The youngsters looked a bit overawed by the wide space around them but they were expert fliers and after about five minutes on the sill watching us a group of adults flying around the barn roof tempted them off Gérard's sill and into the air.