Yesterday started with a bit of a surprise – 12 Greenfinches in the garden.\u00a0 They’ve been scarce so far this autumn\/winter and other observers in Northumberland have noticed the same lack of birds.\u00a0 The worry is that many of our\u00a0local birds may\u00a0have fallen victim to trichomoniasis, so it was good to see, and hear,\u00a0this small flock.<\/p>\n
Most of the rest of the day was spent in a waiting room at our local hospital.\u00a0 I’m not generally good with hospitals\/needles etc so after arriving at my scheduled appointment time (11:30) I had nearly 4 hours to contemplate the forthcoming minor op, before finally being taken to theatre at 3:15pm.\u00a0 There weren’t even any birds visible from the windows of the waiting room so I had to amuse myself reading Fowler and Cohen’s ‘Statistics for Ornithologists’ (see, I thought there might have been a bit of a wait so I went prepared).\u00a0 The hospital were very kind and provided a light lunch.\u00a0 However, given the number of posters about healthy diet etc that plaster the hospital walls you have to wonder about the contents of the lunch; a packet of crisps, a cheese savoury sandwich (note to anyone not from this part of the world – cheese savoury is grated cheese in mayonnaise, you could probably use it to fill cracks in walls) made with sliced white bread and a chocolate cupcake.\u00a0 You couldn’t make it up.<\/p>\n
By the time I was discharged it was dark outside so no chance of birdwatching.\u00a0 And today my birding will be mainly from the office window again as I’ve got no less than 5 meetings to attend; 2 as Chair of Governors at our local school, 1 as Chair of the Friends of Choppington Woods and 2 as Secretary of Outdoors Northumberland.\u00a0 Then there were another 2 meetings that I’ve had to give my apologies for.\u00a0 At least tomorrow should be back to ‘normal’…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday started with a bit of a surprise – 12 Greenfinches in the garden.\u00a0 They’ve been scarce so far this autumn\/winter and other observers in Northumberland have noticed the same lack of birds.\u00a0 The worry is that many of our\u00a0local birds may\u00a0have fallen victim to trichomoniasis, so it was good to see, and hear,\u00a0this small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[823,75,76],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-northumberland","tag-birdwatching","tag-greenfinch","tag-trichomoniasis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions\/288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}