Just add water...

This is our new garden pond, which I first started digging in the autumn last year.

Back in 2008 a couple of mates dug out a small pond in the same site, unfortunately this dried up last summer so I took the opportunity to expand and improve it. Learning from mistakes made the first time round, I hope this pond will be more enduring and attractive to the local wildlife.

As you can see there are two parts to our pond, a small pebble lined pool and a large deeper pool. The former will remain plant free and hopefully ideal for birds to bath and drink from. Already up to 20 individuals use it at any one time.

The deeper pool has very few plants in it at the moment (waiting for the garden centres to restock for the summer!) but these have been kindly donated by Kevin Du Rose and Mike Weedon. Over the coming months I will hopefully lightly stock the pond with a few water lillys and water soldiers.

Already up to 18 Frogs are in the pond, with lots of croaking and chasing going on, so hopefully a bit of frogspawn will be produced soon. Smooth Newts are also back, though I am not sure how successful they will be in breeding this year.

Hopefully this site will produce plenty of photos for my blog in the future.

Goosander in Wales

Ta to Kev Joynes for getting us onto these birds.

Glaucous Gull

Juvenile at Sherringham, Norfolk.

Red Kites

An afternoon spent at Gigrin Farm in deepest Wales early last week was pretty productive though the Black Kite only came in when the food had all gone.

I warned you, the white one was evil....

This (not so) Blackbird arrived in our garden yesterday. It is quite interesting to watch it's different behaviour to the other Blackbirds. Unfortunately, this different behaviour includes being ultra wary of humanoids and other birds making it hard to get any photos. Hopefully I will get some more over the next few days.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqFqaBNqkc - where the title comes from)