Almost three weeks without a post here? I opened my blog looking for something else and was surprised to find a Christmas picture on the top. Oh my! Here we are, well into April, too.

It’s not that we’ve not been doing things, going here and there and enjoying the company of family and friends. Easter was lovely, spent here at home with Edward, Amy and Oliver the Grand Dog. The sun shone and we even ate lunch outside on one day. It’s been chilly since then though, and it was whilst I was in Cirencester yesterday morning that I first thought “Spring”.

It has been lovely to go swimming in the daylight each morning now the sun’s rising sometime before 6am. It won’t be long before we are woken by the dawn chorus too: I read that there’s a Dawn Chorus Festival on the 7 May and smiled when I saw “Set your alarm for the wildest free music festival of the year”, because believe me, no alarm will be needed here!

Perhaps it’s living high amongst quite a few mature trees, in a tall house with windows opening at the same level as the canopy, but every morning we are greeted with nature’s alarm call, birdsong. Scared though I am of these small creatures, I enjoy hearing their calls and can never quite believe how such a tiny thing could possibly make such a loud noise!

In the last week or two, we’ve been amused to hear the surprisingly loud (and frequent) drumming of a woodpecker somewhere very nearby. It’s quite a persistent sound, moves around but is never far away and in spite of my quiet looking around, I have failed to catch sight of it yet. My Hero saw it fly overhead as he sat reading, noting it’s black and white plumage and confirming the identification from my favourite app at this time of the year - BirdNet

Well, our woodpecker has been signalling his presence and looking for a mate, we learned, and perhaps this morning, when there were clearly two different birds calling it seems as though he has either found her or has been unlucky to now have a competitor!

This morning, waking to hear the dawn chorus in blue sky and sunshine, I grabbed my phone and headed out into the garden to record the characteristic sounds of a Gloucestershire Spring.

Hah! First a car went along the lane just beneath us, then a neighbour called out and the birdsong stopped for a few moments. A plane bound for somewhere interesting flew overhead (we’re on the flightpath from LHR) and my idea of capturing a nice recording of birdsong to share here were thwarted. Never mind. Amidst all the noise of modern day life BirdNet identified the songs of a robin, a goldfinch, a bullfinch, a magpie, a wren and a jackdaw. It didn’t mention the moo of a cow clearly heard from across the valley, nor the sound of the train to Paddington which passed through whilst I was there too.

Clearly, if I want to get a good recording of the birds I need to be out with my phone before everything else starts - maybe when I set off swimming in the morning?

Though this is what Cirencester looked like at around 7.30am yesterday morning and I was stuck in a traffic jam!

This morning, I switched from the voice recorder to the camera on my phone and took a few photos instead, recording the sprouts of lily of the valley which are appearing in a wild-ish part of the garden and which always remind me of my Mum, flowering as they do around her birthday early next month. (And yes, even though we have been trying to get rid of those pesky brambles for thirty-odd years, they still keep coming through!)

I took my coffee by the pond and took a snap of the ornamental pear tree which is looking particularly pretty right now.

I heard a “slosh” as I did, because my Hero was taking the blanketweed out of the pond; a never-ending task at this time of the year. The “cure” we are using right now is more effective than many we have used, but still it returns and left unattended for a few days, soon takes over. For a while, we felt it was a hopeless task trying to keep on top of it, but having heard the country’s leading scientist admit that he was similarly defeated by this single-cell organism, we felt better knowing it wasn’t “just us”!

So good morning from a bright and sunny Gloucestershire, where it’s still not warm or settled enough to take the covers off the garden furniture yet. My book group are meeting this afternoon at the local garden centre, where I hope to find a couple of the plants that Amy has suggested for our pots this year. I have decided that, rather than plant lots of smaller containers with ditsy little flowery things, I’d go for a few large “statement” plants which will last and won’t need quite as much attention.

Watch this space! (There might be another post before next Christmas….)