It was one of those days, after an eventful night, and the to-ing and fro-ing to the patient put the blocks on the planned walk. (All is well, just one of them things.)
The local swifts are starting to swarm, eight of them screamed past below chimney pot height as I went and got my father's morning paper. Last sightings of migrants birds are always evocative and nearly always retrospectively so. Swifts always just disappear like somebody switching on the light. You realise a day or two later they've gone.
Arrivals are much easier to notice. I'll soon be seeing the first common gulls drifting back to join the crowd of black-headed gulls on the school field. There haven't been the crowd scenes yet, a dozen was the highest number today. A couple of very dark juvenile lesser black-backs loafed with, I presume, their parents most of the morning before being joined by herring gulls.
I noticed that two of the spadgers' nests are on the go with parents busily filling hungry mouths. One of the tawny-looking cock sparrows brought four youngsters in to the sunflower seed feeder by the rowan and left them to it while he joined a bunch of older youngsters who were demolishing unripe rose hips.
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