Creepy

Late last night the power began cutting in and out - lights were going on and off, switches were tripping on the fuse panels in the utility room, and the UPS packs we use to protect the computers were clicking on and off battery, and beeping their annoyance. Power problems aren't exactly a rare occurrence around here, but it didn't take R very long to realise that this time the issue was specific to our house: the rest of the village was fine. At this point the power was back on, but he phoned the power distribution company anyway, and was advised to check the main fuse in the meter cupboard on the side of the house, and call back if he could smell burning. Which he duly did.

By this time I was starting to feel as if I was having a bizarre dream. R turned off all the fuses inside the house, and then we boiled up some water on the gas hob, sat down in the dark with a cup of tea, and read our respective back-lit devices, while we waited for two emergency engineers to arrive.They turned up pretty quickly, and within an hour had replaced the main fuse. Unfortunately though, when they turned the power back on we discovered that while slowly burning itself to a crisp it had fritzed the internal fuse for the socket circuit at the front of the house, leaving us with no internet connection and no computers. We decided that this was a problem for another day, and went to bed.

This morning I decided to award myself a lie-in, and by the time I surfaced R had booked an electrician to come round later in the day to repair the damaged fuse board, and in the meanwhile had temporarily fixed the computers and the home network by running extension cables from the back of the house to the front. I tidied up a couple of computer tasks I'd had to abandon last night, then got bored and decided to go out.

It was pretty quiet around the feeding station at Hillers, probably because it was so warm and sunny this afternoon that there were large numbers of invertebrates out and about. Or as I tend to think of them, "flying food". But I was quite happy to simply sit and be, watching the woodland and trusting that sooner or later something would happen that was worth photographing. Which it duly did in the shape of a Goldcrest, which flew across the clearing and landed on the windowsill of the hide, about four feet away from me. This sounds like such a Birders' Tale that I hesitate to invite derision by telling it, but despite there being no witnesses (I was alone at the time) and no evidence (the bird and I simply stared at each other for about a second, and then it flew back out without me even having twitched the camera) it did happen, and if I don't record it here I'll probably have forgotten about it by the end of the week, which would be a shame.

I did better with the next photogenic arrival, which was the male Great Spotted Woodpecker in my second photo. By this time the sun had come fully round onto the woodland, but at such a low angle that the light on the scene was lovely, and I knew as I shot a burst of frames that I was going to be happy with the images. And that, I thought, was enough: I had my blip and it was time to go. But as I was gathering my stuff together, I caught a tiny mousy movement spiralling up a tree trunk on the other side of the clearing, and my heart lifted at the realisation that it was a Treecreeper. All thoughts of leaving promptly disappeared out of my head until it finished working the clearing and took off back into the wood. This is my favourite out of many, many images, because I love the listening posture of the tiny assassin, and the contrast between its silky, floofy plumage and the gnarled bark of the old pine; but I've also included a third photo that shows it climbing the trunk of a different tree.