As Chair of Governors at our local First School, I had an invitation to attend the Christmas production this afternoon.\u00a0 It was a heartwarming tale of a little fir tree who was teased for being so small but eventually found his place as a Christmas tree in a children’s hospital.\u00a0 The characters included several fir trees, angels, snowflakes, raindrops, sunbeams, doctors, nurses, foxes, owls, rabbits\u00a0and a woodcutter…as well as kings, shepherds, Mary and\u00a0Joseph.<\/p>\n
Which\u00a0brings us\u00a0nicely to the little fir tree on our patio.\u00a0 I haven’t had as much time to work on my bonsai display as I would have liked this year (one of the perils of running your own business…) so most of the trees have developed dense, lush foliage.\u00a0 I have been regularly trimming any over long shoots so they’re all still quite compact.\u00a0 The display sits midway between six feeders in the apple tree and two feeders on the garden wall, so it’s a regular perch for many of the birds that are visiting.\u00a0 As the weather has turned towards wintry, the number of birds in the garden has increased to the point where it’s almost impossible to watch everything that’s going on.\u00a0 Sarah was at home this morning and we spent a little while just watching the comings and goings.\u00a0 The highlight was two Willow Tits together but there were 15+ Coal Tits, 5 or 6 Bullfinches, 10 Chaffinches, 4 House Sparrows, 4 Greenfinches, a couple of Goldfinches and little groups of Blue and Great Tits.\u00a0 Birdwatching begins at home…and once we get some cold, frosty or snowy weather, my bonsai display should produce some excellent photo opportunities as well.<\/p>\n
A cold, wet mid-December night might not seem that promising in terms of wildlife but we had something new for the garden about an hour ago when a Winter Moth Operophtera brumata<\/em> landed on the outside of the kitchen window.\u00a0 Our little southeast Northumberland garden now has records of about 250 different species of moth.\u00a0 It helps that there’s a 76ha woodland behind us though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Chair of Governors at our local First School, I had an invitation to attend the Christmas production this afternoon.\u00a0 It was a heartwarming tale of a little fir tree who was teased for being so small but eventually found his place as a Christmas tree in a children’s hospital.\u00a0 The characters included several fir […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,98,5],"tags":[823,46,100,27,102,35,101,103,45,28,99],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-choppington-woods-northumberland","category-northumberland","tag-birdwatching","tag-blue-tit","tag-bonsai","tag-bullfinch","tag-chaffinch","tag-choppington-woods","tag-coal-tit","tag-goldfinch","tag-great-tit","tag-willow-tit","tag-winter-moth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","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=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1353,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/1353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}