Flyladyphotography By Wendy Cooper

  Well, just where has this year gone? It seems to have gone by in a flash!   I decided to have a browse back through my nature diary and at first, I thought I'd had a 'quiet' year on the wildlife front, however as I refreshed my memory, I found I'd added nine new birds to my life list as well as a few more insects to my invertebrates list.  I don't keep an annual list, simply a life list of all the species I get to encounter, so I was pleasantly suprised!   ( I have tried to summarise by month and I have been hard pushed to leave things out, so where there are phrases highlighted, I have linked back to previous blogs for more detail.  I have also put together a selection of favourite sightings into an album over on Flickr in date order - there is a link at the end of the blog if you wish to pop over there and have a pictorial wander through my year! )   2016 started with a very mild winter and on my local patch many of the plants I don't usually see ...

  Well hello there!   We recently had a couple of days up on the North Norfolk coast, an area we have not been to for quite sometime, with trips to Suffolk, the Forest of Dean and of course the Isle of Mull  having been taken between times, so a visit to a few of our favourite haunts there was long overdue.   The weather was bright but very cold when we arrived on the Sunday and after a nice lunch in Blakeney, we decided to forgo our usual stroll on the marsh and head to Cley instead. On arriving at NWT Cley Marshes   we decided to go to the single hide on the roadside of the scrapes where the three main hides are first.  As we walked along, we could hear geese honking to each other and there was a distant Kestrel hovering above the reeds.     Once settled in the hide, looking out across the water, there were a selection of Teal and Shovellers dabbling or snoozing and Godwits probing about for food.  From time to time we...