Another hectic week, the weather has been and still is glorious, we are busy which is great and we were up again on numbers for June, not hugely, but up, so that means we have increased our gate every month this year. It’s just a bloody shame that the government has increased the VAT so we lose 20% of it. We had yet another problem with bees yesterday. The swarm that had taken up residence in the eaves of my house swarmed again yesterday, I knew they would because they had gone into the south side of the roof which gets all the sun and so it gets hot as hell under there. They did it just before the 2.00 pm demonstration, but this time went onto the trunk of a tree in the garden, I managed to find the swarm coordinator (!) for Newent and they very kindly came up and recovered the bees whom I hope now will find a good home, preferably miles away from here. Sadly I think the House Martins have given up on their two new nests damn it as they were invaded by the bees.

The birds are doing well, the little new Great Grey Owl baby has been very ill, a virus we think, but fingers crossed, with superb treatment from Neil Forbes and great care from my staff, she is finally looking better and we are hoping she will pull through, its been a tough road for her though. Boom Slang Holly’s new White Faced Scops Owl is charming and doing well, Sidewinder my baby Burrowing Owl bids fair to be every bit as good as Copper and Ruby, he (we hope) is fearless and going through tunnels like a little windup toy, he is enchanting. Grey Cobra is the Abyssinian Eagle Owl that Donatella, our trainee is working with and he flew 20 feet to the fist yesterday, although he was not happy when a helicopter flew over – come to that neither was I! We took out the two baby Lanners a couple of days ago and Simon and Mark are training one each, Adam is waiting for his baby Kite to grow up and is working on one of the Black Kites that has finished moulting – Pyrites, so there are a ton of new birds coming on. And Karis is flying like a dream, I just need the audience to appreciate him more!!

The new tractor is going well and mowing the grass and Nathan seems to like it, he also saved the day yesterday as we had a mix up in the accounts and he is apparently a wizard and so found the missing money that Jan and I could not account for! It was so stressful Jan and I had to have a G+T for lunch yesterday!

Linda is doing great things with the website at the moment and we are in the run up to our first summer barbeque. She has put on some great new pictures, she really does work very hard on it and it shows.

I am trying to merge two word documents at the moment, I need to get on with writing a couple of books and I have two documents both of which I have worked on and I need to put them together. I went to Microsoft help and blow me to give me the answer they want to charge £28!!! Can you credit it, what a flaming rip off. They certainly should not call it help!!