A swim? I haven’t packed my trunk.

African Elephant, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

Yipee… the first of the winter migrants have arrived in the village where I live, more specifically, in the fruit filled holly trees adjacent to our garden (as predicted, Dear Reader, as predicted…. and the winning lottery numbers for this week are…. well, that would be telling!) . Redwings have been gorging themselves on the crimson berries all day though they’ve hardly made a dent in the number of fruit still upon the trees. The berries must be full of nutrients as these members of the thrush family hop around the trees constantly unlike the fat and lazy pigeons who land on branches capable of taking their capacious bulk and then sit there hoovering up all the berries within their reach. The Redwings, unlike the pigeons, remained in deep cover and no amount of camera gear would allow me to photograph them from either the house or the garden. One possibility would be to rig up my hide in the wood but I suspect the view would be comparable to that from my current vantage point. I’m a patient man, I can wait – so I will get some images of these lovely birds.

The weather promises to be rather pleasant tomorrow, and as such we’re going to take advantage of our membership of the ZSL group to visit London Zoo if I can muster the energy – failing that it’ll be one of the other centres to which we have membership so I should be able to get my itchy shutter finger working again. It’s been several weeks since I was out with camera gear, and I’m certainly feeling the side effects of not realising my creative side. Amongst these effects, I have a deep desire to be outside in all my walking regalia, tripod, and rucksack full of lenses, camera, etc. which hopefully should be satiated. There is one issue, however, I need a new pair of walking boot despite only having had them for two years – admittedly I have worn them a tremendous amount and as they were relatively inexpensive they don’t owe me anything, however they’re so comfortable I’m loathed to throw them away.

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