Review of my latest trail camera

Actually, although I got it from the same place as my good trail cameras, this is actually a bird feeder camera, as I rarely get much good bird footage from the trail cameras of birds other than pheasants, ducks and the very occasional woodpecker.

The camera is quite small (and was on offer, which says something), and takes perhaps 150g of bird seed at a time.  It has solar panels to keep the batteries charged up, which seem to be very effective, and takes a 32Gb SD card.  We have it strapped to a redundant lamp post in the middle of the Garden by the Shack.

I first installed it at the end of December 25, and brought it in during the week to clean it out, see if it had done anything and to check that the solar panels keep it fired up - spoiler alert, they do.  Getting it programmed isn't as easy as I had hoped, hence the date/time stamps on the following photos being rather weird, and there are no videos, although it will do them.  Having said that, with 10,218 photo files to go through from about a month in situ, I think the burst of photos are probably all I need to go through!

So, what have I seen?

Well, as  you can see, tits are inquisitive and hungry.

They also like to pose and know which is their good profile.

And the good profile isn't the same for every bird.

Occasionally, you get a really good action shot of an arrival.

Or leaving.

And there are occasional excellent shots of a bird in flight, like this.

Or this.

But there are an awful lot like this - perhaps 90% of the photos - which just need to be deleted.

So far there is a very limited range of birds using the feeder: there is the great tit.

There is the blue tit.

And there is the robin.

Or at least that is who was using it for the first 2,000 files that I have been through thus far.  If I spot anyone else, obviously I'll let you know!

And a reminder - here is what the camera looks like in situ.  Overall, Num'Axes have done me proud again.  The feeder will be out now until the end of March, when we stop feeding birds and let them raise their young naturally.

I'm not sure what this week will bring, but I hope you have a good one!

January stuff

January is such a long month!  While it only has 31 days, they seem to last longer than any other days in the year, but as we drift towards the end of the month, there is a hint of  improvement as slightly longer afternoons become evident if the day isn't totally cloudy.  The harbingers of spring are putting their heads above ground too, as bulbs start to do their thing, and our small clump of snowdrops in the garden put on their annual show.

Over in the country, the first signs of the narcissus fest are also starting to show in the Meadow, with leaves for the less showy daffodils coming up around the edges.

Other plants too are obvious at this time, including the lichen that cover any surface they can get a toe-hold on it seems - trees, plastic seats, gates, fence posts - all seem to be suitable hosts for this rather mysterious plant.

The week started with the annual ceremony of good wishes from the local mayors.  As there will be local elections in March, they can only look backwards at the achievements of the year and of the mandate, as anything that happens later in 2026 could be someone else's project.  For us, it was a slightly sad event, as our village mayor (as opposed to the mayor of Bauge en Anjou) is standing down at the elections.  She has been a good mayor, very understanding and supportive, and not afraid to get her hands dirty on the food line with the Comité des Fetes.  However the work of a mayor in France is varied and challenging and I can understand the desire for a quiet life after (I think) 14 years in the role.

We have spent the week with two recurrent themes.  It has been Truffle Week for us, as 100g of the black gold arrived last Saturday.  Some has been steeped in sunflower oil for a week to provide home made truffle oil, some has been inserted into a mild cheese to create our own truffled cheese, and much of it has been eaten in the usual scrambled eggs, cream sauces and risottos.  We have one day left and then we wait another 12 months.  The photo is leek and mushroom risotto with monkfish and truffle - very tasty.

We have also enjoyed watching as our neighbours had their roof replaced, or at any rate the side of the roof that looks towards our house.  There was much jollity at the Ceremony of Voeux last week as all slates had been removed and all that protected them was a tarpaulin, but from Monday, the roofers were on the job, putting up new timbers to support rather heavier slates than those that were taken off.

Then the insulating membranes were fixed in place with battens.

Before a happy day of putting on the new slates - this is half finished at lunchtime, as when it was all done, apart from being shinier and blacker than before, you wouldn't know the difference from the outside.

From Monday, the roofers will do the other side of the house, which we won't get to see.  The neighbours are very happy with the work.

Friday night was the Comité des Fetes AGM, with the volunteers' dinner afterwards - another of those lovely village events that leave you somewhat fuzzy the day after.  This week will be quieter - perhaps I can get some tidying up done, and find the material for the "new" living room curtains.  I know I saw it when we moved in over 20 years ago...

Have a good week!

Wildlife activity

I brought in one of the wildlife cameras for its regular check up - I clear off the files and recharge the batteries (or change them - I've only got one working set of rechargeable batteries).  Going through the files takes quite a time, even if there are only 400 (!) this time round.  I delete the obvious ones - pictures of my feet and bottom as I go to and fro around the camera - or where they are blurred or where there is no wildlife.  A second pass is required for me to be more critical and determine whether or not I have enough photos of the rear half of badgers and boar, enough blurred pine martens and sufficient retreating deer bottoms.

Some files need a bit of examining to see exactly what I have captured - the ones where the camera is attacked by randy great tits being a case in point!  While others need a bit of editing to show the true beauty of a wild animal in its natural habitat - getting rid of the extraneous background that might give too much detail of the location of the camer for example.  There were some good photos in the first 150 files on the camera!

This badger was rather nice.

While I don't like coypu, this photo is not too bad.

Birds are the hardest to get it seems and I think this is the short-toed treecreeper that I often hear identified on the Merlin bird app.

The videos also need careful triaging - with the camera on a crossroads, you often get the tail of something disappearing, or the backside heading into the distance.  I hope the following selection are of interest.

This one is of a badger just checking things out.

And then there is one with two badgers checking things out together.

There is a red squirrel being acrobatic.

There is a video with a bird and a squirrel!

There is a pine marten being phenomenally cute.

There's a fox checking things out.

And there is a dog fox doing what all canines do.

What a fine brush he has!

We are also in the process of cleaning out the bird boxes before we put them back.  The really cheap tiny one had an acorn left in it by a squirrel, but the other two had fine nests in them so they did their job.  Once we have done a fire clean on the inside, they will go back up for the next season.

And yes, I'm afraid we evicted the spider!

The truffles arrived yesterday, so next week should be all about my culinary adventures with black gold.

Have a good week!

 

That review of 2025 I promised

Well, we are through the snow, the freezing rain and the storm (which wasn't much around here, but others suffered big time).  Even more amazingly, we have survived the conversion to Fibre, so now I revel in 92Mbps here at my computer at the end of a 20m ethernet cable.  Down by the modem, it is rather more like 520Mbps, but we haven't really noticed the revolutionary new speeds.  The TV still whirls around from time to time, waiting for a signal, and the radio glitches sometimes too.  But I guess that's not the point.  Anyway, 2025?

It started in fog, murk and dankness - the first two months were dominated by the Dunkelflaute and its spirit sapping dullness and depressingness.  It was also very, very wet, and le Loir flooded up at la Fleche for example.

Such weather is of course a breeding ground for germs and other nasties, and we lost a chunk of February to 'flu and feeling sorry for ourselves.

But then with March, the clouds lifted, the skies dried up, we started to feel a lot more vigorous and enthused and started to prepare for a new gardening season.  Mother Nature also seemed to think that actually 2025 might be alright and the blossom fest started.

We bought in loads of compost, and got stuck in to making 2025 more flowery and more fruitful than 2024, including actually doing something with the cheap bulbs you can buy from Aldi (other discount stores are available).  Therefore in April, I started to reap the benefits of that and could admire my whimsical wellies - the only way I would stop wearing my much loved and very broken old wellies was to use them as planters.

2024 was a horrid year on many levels, and in particular the weather.  We only had the cover up on the gazebo for about 5 weeks and even then it got torn in high winds.  But 2025 was warmer, sunnier and so by May we had the cover mended and up so that we could enjoy a sneaky glass of something in the garden before I started to cook dinner.

One of the sagas of the year was the courgette harvest.  In 2024, I bought a packet of 12 seeds, planted them all, 9 came up, 6 were eaten by slugs, 3 were planted out, one then died and on the other two we had perhaps 4 courgettes.  In 2025 I bought another packet of 12 seeds and planted them, 10 came up, none were eaten by slugs, none died in the transplanting phase, and we ended up with over 372 courgettes harvested over the season.

The men's Tour de France is contested in July, and after many years of not coming anywhere near us, in 2025 there was a stage start in Chinon, so we had to go.  We'd not been to a stage start before.  The crowds were huge and it was only as someone knew someone with a view over the paddock that we got anywhere near seeing anything, but what we did, was Brilliant!

August is Comice time and this year I was on the float for the village with 3 chums and we had a lot of fun on the procession, with surely the prettiest tractor of the lot (not that you can see it on this photo).

In September the harbingers of autumn really come into their own and the cyclamen in the One Acre Wood were outstanding this year, lasting right the way through to late November in places.

October is the month of the Communal Challenge Boules de Forte tournament.  This year the team I was part of (Comite des Fetes Women) did bizarrely well.  Rather than forfeits, we actually won games, much to the disgust of some of our opponents who took the whole thing rather more seriously.  In the end we were demolished in the final by a team of council workers, and very well done to them.  Even so, it was weird to do so well.  I'm still not taking it up as a serious sport.

In November I dashed over to the UK for a few days to see family and repair an heirloom chair which had a broken seat.  I hadn't done any real canework in about 20 years, so it was fun to find out I hadn't forgotten how, and a real sense of pride in getting a whole seat done in about 5 hours.  If I'm being really pickie, it's not quite as perfect as it would have been when we did this semi-professionally, but I'm still chuffed with it.

December brings all the fun and games of the end of year festivities, and this year was remarkable for being in the right place, and at the right time, to meet these magnificent dancing Arctic Fox puppets.  They were just amazing and it was a joyous parade.

So that was 2025 as I remember it in photos, and it was a rather pleasant year with a bunch of enjoyable outings and activities, decent weather, a lot of garden produce, and meeting up with friends and family.  2026 has a lot to live up to - we'll see how it goes.

During the week I brought in a trail camera that had been out for a couple of months, so perhaps next week I will have some stuff from that to share with you.

Have a good week!

 

Real Winter weather

I know I said I would do a review of the year, but it has been too cold to spend time in front of the computer this week, and as the old Typepad blog has gone, I will have to review photos from the months of January to July at least to work out what to say about those months.  That will have to wait for next weekend, when we should have had a couple of warmer days.

Indeed adding photos currently is problematic - either due to a cold computer or to frosted lines!  I'll try again!

That's better.  Even so, strange things keep happening - perhaps someone in China is trying to hack Blogger and all that use it?  Who knows?

I think I have explained before that we have a good electricity contract, that for 300 days of the year means that we get very cheap electricity.  For another 43 days, there is a slight reduction in the price per unit.  Then for 22 days a year, the electricity unit price is exorbitant, really ouch-worthy.  So last Monday was a Red day (the high price day), Tuesday was White (a middle price day) and Wednesday, New Year's Eve, was another Red day.  As the day is 6am to 6am, that would have put paid to any celebrations here that required electric heating, kettles, irons, raclette ovens and the like.  In practice, it sent us to bed very early with hot water bottles, hot milk and good books!

The rest of the week has been White, although today is Blue (Sundays have to be Blue or low price - it's in the contract), and tomorrow we are back to Red.  It limits what you can do, and thankfully I am no longer required to be in front of a computer all day every day.

Naturally there are upsides to this cold.  It is excellent for the trees and particularly the fruit trees, which need this cold shock to properly calm down after an extraordinary fruit season last year and to kill off any bugs and nasties that are doing the rounds.  It also means that there are lots of lovely photos to be taken of ice crystals on various things.

Naturally some wildlife will struggle.  We feed birds over at the Place in the Country and the tits are getting through lots of fat balls and seed bells.  My camera bird feeder is now in place and will be (I hope) stuffed full of photos and videos of birds fighting over the seed largesse that I've put out.  I've had to refill it once and it will need done again tomorrow.  I'm also capturing on average 16 different species of bird each visit on the Merlin bird song app.

Getting firewood in from the One Acre Wood keeps us warm during the day, and the joys of visiting the Wood are many, but perhaps the greatest is taking time to enjoy the amazing view north across the valley.

In theory, this cold snap should break around Wednesday or Thursday.  It is fairly remarkable.  We don't remember such cold temperatures over such a long period since January/February 2012, when we had some 8 inches of snow and temperatures down to about -10 degrees Celsius overnight for about ten days.  The last proper snow was February 2018, when we had our new stairs fitted, and then only 3 or 4 inches lasting 3 or 4 days.  Last winter was cool - for days and days the temperatures wavered between -1 and +3 and overcast, which was challenging for the soul.  This sharp cold is challenging for the extremities!

So, Happy New Year to you!  Tomorrow is our second go at having fibre optic (or superfast broadband) installed, so next week there may, or may not, be a blog reviewing 2025, depending on how that installation goes.  Fingers crossed!

Have a good week!

 

That's Christmas done for another year

That was a rather different one!  Talking to my brother on Boxing Day, he thought that I had experienced a White Christmas before, but as I would have been between 2 and 5 (he wasn't sure which), I wouldn't have remembered it.  The weather forecast was really quite accurate for once, and when John got up in the early hours, he came back to bed muttering about it snowing.  When we got up, everything was covered in a covering of white, except the road, which was rather magical.  My first White Christmas.  Even better, by the time we were ready to go out to do stuff, it had mostly thawed.

The sun came out and we were able to do our favourite ritual for Christmas.  Once we had fed the Boys in the Country, we walked from there to the One Acre Wood, where we beat the bounds and then offered a Yuletide drink to the big oak, the King of the Forest.  There wasn't much snow in the wood, but it had settled on the log bench and someone had been to visit.  We don't think it was a cat, as there aren't any houses close by, but wondered if it was a pine marten.  Whoever it was, was long gone by the time we were there.

Because we had a modicum of faith in the weather forecast, I dug up the Christmas vegetables on Christmas Eve - two parsnips, one of which was particularly fine, a bunch of carrots, some potatoes and a couple of white radish.  They were delicious roasted on Christmas evening with a duck. and there are more to be roasted tomorrow to make a thick and rich mid-winter soup.

The cold has settled in now, and the past few days have been sunny but raw with a wind from the East.  Checking round the Orchard yesterday, I was followed by a very rotund robin, fluffed up against the cold, but waiting to see if I fell over so he could have a feast of human flesh.  The Blue and Great Tits are all over the fat balls we put out for them, and today I installed my Christmas present to myself - a bird feeder with wildlife camera included.  It will remain in place until late March or early April, depending on the weather, at which point I stop putting out food as Nature provides.

Of course it is not just fat robins you find in trees at this time of year and in this weather.  Rebus likes to be in charge of the garden, but the snowy and frosty ground is not totally to his taste.  He therefore supervised me dealing with laundry from the potentially warmer safety of the pear tree.

It is the time of year for mindlessly scrolling through drivel on smartphones, but you do spot the occasional nugget of interest.  I saw a recipe for eggs - they called them poached, but I think they are more baked - which I just had to try as we are still overly well supplied with eggs.  You whisk up the whites with a bit of salt until they are really stiff, then you put cooking parchment on a baking tray and using those very cheffy rings, make towers of egg white.  In the top of each you make a shallow dent and place carefully an egg yolk, then cover that with finely grated cheese of your choosing, plus a bit of pepper and salt to taste.  You bake them in a preheated oven (in my case to Gas Mark 5) for about 5 minutes and they are done, and really very tasty - a sort of savoury Iles Flottant.

They should  have been prettier, but I couldn't find my stainless steel chef's rings!

So that is it for 2025, but i will review the year properly next week.  Enjoy your celebrations and stay warm!

To quote - "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!"

There are decorations everywhere in the towns and villages and the last Christmas Fairs are taking place this weekend in the smaller locations.  The big Christmas Fairs in major cities will carry on for a while yet, but the ones that last a weekend are nearly over.  During the week, we went back to Chinon and saw their decorations at night - we assume that they get a bit of a bung from the nuclear power plant close by and will have a bit of cash in the coffers after hosting both men's and women's Tour de France in the summer.  The Place Mirabeau looks like something out a Disney film, it is so pretty.

Santa and chums are in the main square near the Mairie, overlooked by the Chateau and its floodlights.

 Last weekend we enjoyed the Christmas Fair at Chinon, with its food and craft stalls.  The first weekend of Advent, we went to a small local Christmas Fair in the barns attached to a local market garden and direct sales shop.  That was enchanting as the venue was a bit different, the stalls were clearly run by the people who produced the things for sale, and there was a lovely mixture of things to nibble, decorations and affordable presents.  Today we went to our last Fair of the season and found it rather disappointing - there are only so many woollen scarves and fake pashminas, leather wallets and handbags, and crystal necklaces and bracelets that can be gawped at.  Few were produced locally although the vendors had shops in the department.  The wines weren't particularly local, and only three of the food vendors were very much of the area.  It is also difficult to create a festive atmosphere in what is essentially a concert hall.  Perhaps the most disappointing of the three.

Having been snide about the provenance of some of the goodies on sale today, the cats' Christmas treats turned up from China this week - a sunflower for when a collar of shame is required, and a "golden snitch" for when Rebus needs exercise.  The latter has already produced hours of fun and exercise for a boy cat.

It is tricky being an over-energetic cat at this time of year, as the days are so short (although they get longer from today - yey!).  I discovered Rebus likes to guard the chickens when they are eating - I guess when they stop stuffing their beaks he runs away, as they are quite aggressive towards cats!

And on that note, I will wrap up for today.  Tomorrow we are moving into the 21st Century with fibreoptic internet, assuming all goes well.  If it doesn't, we are back to the happy days of dial up I fear.  Experiences of the switch over vary, and I am hopeful that we have managed to stagger the pain, by changing internet box before the line changes so that any problems can be clearly identified as the line and not the box.  I've supervised one installation for a chum, which went smoothly, but you hear such horror stories...  Wish us luck!

And in any case, Merry Christmas to you and yours!