19th September 2016 Grey and cool. [Like me?]

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Monday 19th 56F, 13C, heavy overcast and breezy. Expected to remain so. An hour and a half walk under very grey skies. Skirting the edges of field and crossing the few remaining stubble fields. Upset the laughing ducks. If only I had taken out my camera before 200+ ducks all flew away across the pond in unison.

An elderly bulldozer with an even older driver working on landscaping a worked-out sand quarry. Taken from several hundred yards away.

The water birds like the lake left behind out of view on the left. The houses which had suffered years of quarrying activities and frequent lorry movements can now enjoy the peace of the countryside with a lake to improve the view. It is amazing to see how rapidly the land recovers once the saved heaps of topsoil are replaced. Though what they intend to do with the really deep quarries is unknown. Most are more of a surface scrape than a massive crater. The sand is passed through rolling drums with screens of different mask sizes to remove stones and segregate them by size. These machines are very noisy and go on all day, every day, for literally years in some cases. Which sounds exactly like me.

Continuing the tracked machinery theme: Another large Case II tractor towing a huge seed drill. Again, this picture was taken from the road a very long way from the activity. I was standing patiently waiting for it to return to the road and it stopped halfway and turned around.

I heard two shots as I walked towards the woods but continued on as they seemed to be well off to the SE. It is always interesting to see my small world from different viewpoints. The previously untrodden fields rise and fall revealing new vistas. I even saw the sea channel and Jylland today from the usually inaccessible, top of a hill. Only a very light breeze so far and definitely cooler of late.

After coffee I rode NW for 15 miles.  Failed to obtain that which I went for. Then rode 16 miles back again by a different route, against a light, head crosswind. Saw buzzards and kestrels, swans and coots, several bulls, a few sheep and lots of cows, heifers and bullocks enjoying the great outdoors. Do animals which are kept indoors suffer from agoraphobia? Perhaps we should be be told? More Danish news headlines about government agencies ignoring the continuing massive build up of antibiotics in farming and simultaneously ignoring MRSA in the stock. 12,000 Danes carry a pig MRSA and seven have died while the ministry ignored expert advice and failed to pass the messages upwards to their masters.

Just a small part of a huge Hawthorn showing the masses of fruit this year.

Tuesday 20th 50-55F, 10-13C, heavy grey overcast with darker clouds visible with a hint of falling damp in the air. Almost dead calm though the wind turbines are turning. A walk up to the woods and back over the fields. It was cool but the lack of air movement made it comfortable enough in my thinnest jacket and t-shirt. The first bird I noticed was a buzzard mewing its complaints to anyone who would listen. The pheasant garrison was guarding the entrance to the woods but went all guerilla on me when I tried to photograph them. There was a huge area spread across the approach track with hundreds of what looked like gull feathers and down. No sign of any corpses so they may simply have been preening in a very large group overnight. Or, a bird of prey which removed the body? There seemed to be no epicenter for the widespread plumage. Rest day working on my project.

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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