from Going Gently https://ift.tt/3yx4bI6
Questions
Two magpies
It seems that on our journeys through life, we are forever trying to make sense of things. Questions shuffle across our mindscreens about big and little things. From fairly insignificant personal stuff to enormous questions about the nature of the universe.
For the past forty years I have been a regular feeder of birds in every season and this extended experience has thrown up a whole bunch of questions...
- Why don't magpies whistle - instead of cackling like the three witches in "Macbeth"?
- Can different species of bird communicate with each other?
- Why do pigeons seem so stupid when their navigation skills are so brilliant?
- How exactly do swallows make their way to Yorkshire from Africa each year?
- Having never seen goldfinches in our garden how come two arrived on the very morning I put up a new feeder containing niger seeds?
- Why do many gun crazy men in Malta and some other Mediterranean islands think it is okay to shoot birds, helping to drive them to extinction?
- Where do birds go when it is raining?
- How do all the other birds know to disappear when there's a sparrowhawk in our garden?
- Why are rooks such nervous birds when they are on the ground?
- Why have robins got red breasts?
I have asked God Google all of these questions but the answers have characteristically been unsatisfactory or inconclusive. Besides, even though the questions have arisen, there is a sense in which I do not really want to know most of the answers. The mystery of what is unknown can be very appealing.
Robin - I took this picture in the wintertime
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/3yuyGys
Slugger Albert
“ He’s not the easiest of patients!”
So said the know-all receptionist told me when I called back to the vets after Albert had received his X-ray
“ I did warn the vet that he’s not the friendliest of cats, he WAS mismanaged at a previous surgery “ I reminded her but she wasn’t really interested.
I asked to see the vet
Albert had come round from his anaesthetic and was fighting fit.
I could hear him from reception.
I had booked him in early as a precaution. He was eating fine and had asked to go out early this morning for his usual hunt, but he was slightly guarding his deformed leg and he limped a little more than usual.
It had taken two burly country vets and a practice nurse to anaesthetise him.
He had no new leg fractures but must have jarred his old injury the vet told me as there was marked arthritic changes around his repaired leg fracture of a decade ago. The vet noted an “old “ vertebral fracture that was probably missed by his former vet. She had also checked his teeth and removed a tick from his shoulder given the information he didn’t like , even me picking him up
“ He’s lucky” she said “ and he’s a fighter!”
I noted she had a fresh plaster to the back of her hand.
Without the dogs in the car , he wailed all the way home from inside his basket, only shutting up when I let him out in the kitchen where the dogs smelled hesitantly at his left leg, where he had been shaved and canulated .
He’s slept on my bed most of the afternoon, only coming down to eat some specially cooked chicken on the window ledge. I snapped him then sharing my eggy breakfast plate with Mary before he took himself off upstairs again to rest.
The fight all but left him
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/3jM7kzV
Love
Today
I’m grateful
To see
To hear
To breathe
And love others
Just as
He loved me
from R's rue https://ift.tt/36fJ2X1
EUA
I’m sat in the vet’s car park
Thinking of where I can get some proper coffee in Denbigh.
Albert has just been dropped off for his X-ray .
Examination Under Anaesthetic
He was a bit stressed, bless him, something that Dorothy didn’t help with as she dropped her pacifier ( an expensive hard plastic handled gardening trowel) into the boot from a dislodged back parcel shelf and barked her annoyance so much I had to stop off at a lay-by to retrieve it.
Gawd only knows how much the X-ray will be
Hey ho
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/3dNwmea
الاشتراك في:
الرسائل (Atom)