Quiet

A strange day here today - so still. We live amongst hills and can expect wind of some kind every day. Not today. A day so still it felt quite eerie, especially as it has also been very quiet. 

I sat outside and wondered at the silence. Over the last few days we have had the constant sound of grass cutting and the trundling of huge hay loads going past - all finished now. I could hear a few children in a garden close by, but they soon disappeared. The cows were silently munching grass and wandering up and down the field. And I realised that there was no birdsong, well hardly any. Funny how all the song we have had has suddenly finished - just a few tweets here and there, even the pigeon sounded a long way off. 

So, I sat in the still and the quiet and watched a few young Blue Tits come back and forth to the peanuts, undisturbed by any other birds. Blue Tits seem to have done well this year - there are a number of youngsters about. They have yellow cheeks, adults have white. Neither do they have much blue as yet. They undergo a post- juvenile moult replacing all their body feathers and some of the wing feathers. You can see this happening on this young one. 

We had lunch outside and then Gordon disappeared to go to see 'Oppenheimer' - I stayed here in the quiet and got a lot of reading done - the Blue Tits were nice company.