The Eye of the Tiger

This morning I joined a Nordic Walking group at the RSPB nature reserve. I used to do Nordic walking when we lived in Belgium, and really enjoyed it, so I’ve recently been looking to see if there’s a group locally, and when I was at the RSPB last week, I saw a notice about this group.

It’s only a small group, there were 8 of us including Tony who runs it, and it wasn’t very intense (unlike the group in Belgium), but everyone was very welcoming, and it’s nice to get back into it and meet other people. Apparently Tony runs another group on Saturday mornings which is for 2 hours and is more intense, so I may give that a try sometime.

After the walk everyone goes to the cafe for a coffee and they invited me to join them, and then later in the day Tony added me to the Whats App group and I got lots of lovely messages welcoming me into the group, needless to say, I’ll be going back next week.

Before leaving, I went for another walk around the reserve with my camera, and one of the ladies gave me her little pot of meal worms so that I could attract the robins, and they worked, I had two robins that fed from my hand! I’ve always wanted to do this but have found them too timid, but these two kept coming back for more, it was wonderful!

I went home for lunch with Alan, and then this afternoon went for a shift at the zoo. It’s really quiet there at this time of year, and it makes you realise how the zoo rely on the annual memberships, as the animals and grounds still need looking after even though the visitors are low in numbers. I met two young American soldiers from NATO who are stationed over here and we had a nice chat. They had taken a week off and had driven to Scotland and climbed Ben Nevis, and tomorrow they’re going to climb Snowdon.

My blip today is of Kinara, our female Sumatran tiger. Usually they’re asleep when I go to see them but today they were awake in their house when I arrived and the male Budi was licking Kinara and I managed to get some really good video footage of them before Kinara jumped down and walked towards me - fortunately there was a window between us! They then went outside and climbed onto a high platform, and I watched as a seagull flew down and Budi tried to catch it with his paw! The seagull dodged the attack and lives another day.