The glorious weather of the past couple of weeks has had a bit of a hiccup, but the rain is what makes everywhere so green anyway, so what the hell! My pond is full and with a breeze and autumn leaves are gently floating on it, they are all shapes sizes and colours. The smaller pond if you stand and watch will occasionally have a huge plopping sound, I thought it might be fish, but in fact it is the cider pears dropping from the tree into the pond!

I tend to curse the cider pears at this time of the year as once they are on the ground and start to rot a little they become less bitter and the dogs happily lie in the sun and munch them, which leads to other things in the house at a later date!

My Sparrowhawk is a joy to fly, the first time you encourage an accipiter to go into a tree, with hopes
of course that he or she will come out again, they sit there for a second and then change character, laddering up the tree with glee and pretending that they are no longer a trained hawk, but in fact no longer have any interest in you at all. This Bitterly did, sizzling about the tree climbing higher and higher. He did deign to come down a couple of times at speed but pulled out before hitting my fist and then landed even higher in the trees. Eventually I moved away and he followed to a lower tree and down he came. Since then he has got trees sorted and follows through them and comes steaming into the fist.

We are now a three accipiter family as a lovely female African Goshawk arrived on Sunday, kindly given to me by a good friend, she weighs just under a pound and is stunning to look at. We are looking forward to flying her as well.  She has the most amazing black skin inside her mouth!


Surprisingly I have taking two days off this week - first day off since December last year! I am going riding with Sally (first time on a horse since I broke my back) and then to see the Red Kites at Gigrin - also a first! And then staying away (voluntarily!!!!) and going on a mushroom foray on Saturday. Phew will I survive I wonder!

We have had to cancel the Halloween Owl Evening, almost no take up, but I think it is because it is not really suitable for young children and they will all be out trick or treating, which is not something I like or understand. So if we do one again we will have to make it very different from all the others. We are adding another owl to the owl evenings, which should be great fun and I am looking forward to seeing how it works! Of course there is always the added bonus of one of us falling into the new ponds!