Casing the joint...

This is a sort of emergency blip, as the weather here has been wet and windy for most of the day. I haven't actually been out of the house in daylight, and the only photographs I've taken were through our not very clean window!

This is one of our neighbourhood grey squirrels, bold creatures who think nothing of stealing all the bird seed if they get half a chance. Earlier this week they destroyed one of our feeders, which we found in several pieces on the ground. We've now replaced this with an all metal version which is supposed to be squirrel-proof. This individual was checking it out - so far they don't seem to have worked out how to break in, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before a method for extracting the sunflower seed is devised.

Apart from the weather it's been a good day. The morning was spent cleaning and cooking, as our eldest son, Chris, is home for the weekend tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it as I haven't seen him since the beginning of October - hopefully we'll manage to get out for a couple of good walks.

This afternoon was spent assisting Alex with his AS level coursework - which involved counting the heartbeat of Daphnia exposed to varying concentrations of Red Bull. I took a look under the microscope and don't know how he managed to count fast enough - one individual had a rate of over 500 beats per minute!

I spent this evening at a Wildlife Trust talk about the effects of Climate Change on Local Wildlife.The speaker was excellent and for once it wasn't all doom and gloom. The current message is to think on a landscape scale and make nature reserves much larger, better managed and connected, to enable the movement of species in response to changing temperatures. There will be winners and losers, but here in the fens the restoration s of sizeable areas of wetland habitat means we can hope to see new species such as spoonbill and bluethroat become established,as well as the spread of some rare UK species such as the Norfolk Hawker. Exciting times....