Saturday 4 February 2012

Orchard Wildlife

  
As most of you will know we are keeping our equines in an old over grown orchard, there are two pieces of land that have been cleared, one where we kept our horses and ponies over summer and the other where they are currently stabled. The rest of the orchard is all over grown trees and weeds, which means there is a lot of wildlife around, the photo above has an animal in it but can you see him? (Click to enlarge) If not I’ll show you at the end of this post.

  
Here is a rather poor photo of a robin, there are lots of robins in the orchard, quite a few hang around near the muck heap, and most of the others near an old mound of mossy logs, all the robins are surprisingly comfortable near humans.

 
And here is just one of the many wild cats that hunt in the orchard, this one is one of the less feral and doesn’t run away too much, they all keep themselves in good condition and at the same time help deal with rodents.

  
This is a photo of a flock of fieldfare, but due to the dark winter days the camera can only make them out as silhouettes.

  
Here is one of the many bugs that inhabits the orchard I honestly haven’t the foggiest what it is. I took this photo last summer, when it was nice and sunny.


 And finally here is the first photo only with red markers to show you, it is a very well hidden grass snake, it may not be helped by the fact that blogger won’t let my photos be enlarged much.

Anyway I am done with my boring post about animals other than horses and ponies.


5 comments:

Margaret said...

This was not boring at all and I had no idea where that snake was until the end! The silhouetted birds photo is awesome... I love it. Interesting, I think, to see what life is like around the barnyard area. Has a snake ever gotten under the horses feet? Have you had a horse shy from one?

Sherri B. said...

I agree with Margaret, this is not boring at all..Eeeek I hate snakes so we will move right along to my next comment. - Your robins look so different from ours, how strange. I will try to remember to send you a photo of ours. - About enlarging the photos..I found that if, while you are making your post, you go to where it says Edit HTML it will say a bunch of strange things and then you will see 'width with a number like 460 (I just made that up) anyway you will see another number too and you can change those numbers but I haven't taken the time to figure out how much to change it to make it look right. Email me if you don't have a clue what I was just babbling about, hahaha!

RDA Pony Tales said...

Wow Edward, these are great pictures! The bug is totally amazing (no idea what it is either!). I will have to do a post on 'my bad pics' to let you see my really blurred robin, duck and frog photos... they really are BAD!.
Have you had lot's of snow? We had a small covering, but I gather is it worse in the south.
Regards, Abby

Anonymous said...

Great photos Edward, I would have run a mile if I'd seen the snake. I nearly trod on one at a friends yard a few years ago, I was squeezing through a gap in a fence just as it was slithering through, I nearly had a heart attack!

Edward said...

Thanks everyone for your great comments, glad you didn’t find it boring.

Margaret, you don’t see many snakes in England and I’ve only see two here, the one in the photo and then one when I was riding, that one came close to a nasty end, because Niko did not shy from it and nearly crushed it, but I decided to get him to go around, I don’t know if other horses might shy from a snake. We only have the one poisonous snake in England and you don’t get them in this part of country.

Sherri, I had no idea that robins looked different in the USA to in GB I would be very interested to see one. Thank you for your advice and I believe I understand what you are talking about :)

Abby, glad you liked the bug I meant to use the photo on my blog somehow when I took it but it didn’t really fit in, so it was nice to use it now. I think a post of your bad photos would be fun. Yes we have had snow I am about to do a post on it.

Hannah, I used to really rather like snakes in the end I even got my own snake, but it was a very short lived experience because the snake was very aggressive and as I am not a professional snake type I didn’t know what to do, so we had him taken away by a collector who kept reptiles for pleasure, so it all turned out well. I’ll stick to horses from now on.