Intimidating....

Another day...another backblip. Once again I was just too tired to do my blip last night.

It's not surprising as I didn't stop all day. Pete and I decided to give the kitchen a deep clean, prior to the boiler being serviced. The trouble is, over the summer, only the minimum cleaning gets done, and gradually the dirt just builds up, particularly when you do a lot of cooking and have pets! So we set to and spent about four hours scrubbing, sorting and polishing. And I didn't even attempt the insides of the cupboards, though at least all the shelves have been done.

A quick break for lunch and then we were off to do our annual monitoring visit to Bradley Fen, part of the Nene Washes. The washes are an area of land which floods in winter and in total are about twenty miles long. They are of international importance for breeding waders and wintering wildfowl. Fortunately we only have to look at a small section, but it's still over a mile from end to end, and I have to walk all the ditches within it. It takes about four hours of steady walking.

The site is cattle grazed, with a suckler herd. Today there were two bulls, a large white Charolais type, who kept apart from the rest of the herd, and a rich red bull. Now I like cattle, but I also respect them. Unfortunately the herd, complete with the red bull, were just where I needed to be, so against my instincts I had to walk towards him.

He seemed very placid, but I kept half an eye on him as I was recording my ditches, and if I saw him looking at me I turned sideways (it presents a less intimidating profile) and lowered my eyes so that I didn't appear to be a threat. All was going well, until one of the cows decided to get spooked and then the whole herd started moving swiftly towards me, complete with bull.

I have to admit to a moment of internal panic, but as there was no escape route, I just stood still and waited for them to settle and get bored with me. This image shows the dominant cow who caused all the trouble - what you can't see is the bull away to the right, but I decided that taking his photograph might not be wise!

I moved gently away and was pleased to see that they didn't follow. Eventually they all went off to a different part of the site, except for one lone animal. I carried on with my survey, but realised this beast was standing close to my last ditch, and as I approached it I realised it was the other bull. And there were no other cows around to take it's mind off me!! Again I just had to keep going, but once it had looked me over it went back to gently cropping its grass.

I have to say I was quite glad when I'd finished, but on the whole it had been quite enjoyable. The grassland and ditches don't look very exciting, but I had good views of two Jack snipe and two sandpipers, and there were flocks of yellow wagtails, corn buntings and linnets, as well as a myriad of swallows feeding over the River Nene before their long migration. Magic!