Its been a day of bits, and serious wind. Howling through the trees and the wires that bring our electricity into the buildings, its quite an intimidating noise. We started and three quarters finished the concreting of the footings for the replacement aviary at the end of the Hawk Walk. I will be very glad when it is done and the Hawk Walk is secure again, I hate the open end, which it was not designed for, and which makes me feel that the trained birds are not as safe as I would like.

We did manage the first flying demonstration, but after that we decided that the wind was just too strong to fly the birds with any degree of safety, so Holly weighed and fed everyone and got them all safely tucked up for the night. Robin, Kieran and Adam mixed concrete and barrowed it, I helped on occasion between other jobs. Mike dug the foundations, I had forgotten how good he is with a digger, it’s a pleasure to watch. Sedge thought he could help with the digging, but was banned as a liability! Acer thought it was more fun to push the sides of the trench in on the newly laid concrete and Indigo just put a paw in to carry on the tradition of no concrete being laid on the place without a Labrador paw print in evidence! All the foundations are dug, the hard core is placed to back fill once the brickwork is done and the spare soil has filled in the sunken ditch in the wood and Adam and Kieran even managed to spread it out. Poor John stuck with the cleaning up of all the remaining timber, the pile is reducing slowly. Glen and Jane cleaned baths and raked more bloody leaves. Who would have thought trees have so many!!

However they are close to all gone now. The sycamore tree in the field just has a trimming of leaves left looking like a strip of lace at the bottom of a ladies skirt, the rest of the tree is bare. Only a couple of Oak trees have leaves remaining and the Lime tree is fast losing his, then winter will really be here. Having said that, with all the rain and the wind, it is still warm, almost no frosts and still mild. Many of my plants are thinking about getting new shoots, which is not a good idea.

I phoned the chap from whom I bought my poor male Lugger falcon to see if he had a male left. He had had no interest in the young and had both a male and female left, brother and sister to the fox killed falcon. So we came to a good agreement and they are both coming down on Thursday. We will train them both and fly the male for a couple of years before putting him in with Maya. She had better like him after all this effort. Hopefully the female will replace Dawn Run as a good flyer.

I just love the spell checker on this thing, it gives hilarious options for words that it does not know, but sadly does not give the option to teach it!