Blech...

Still struck with the plague. Ye Gods and Little Fishies, will this ever go away? Bladdy viruses....

I am getting better. Very slowly. Tried the 'gentle wanders [well, as gentle as Tilbury Dog would allow..] with the Folks at the weekend' routine again. They didn't aggravate my lurgy as much as the week before, which is something. I've staggered about the nearer bits of the Patch as well - I even managed to count some grebes yesterday! Woohoo. 71 GC Grebes and a surprise 2 BN Grebes off Blackball, plus a Razorbill. More interest came in the form of a large [for here] flock of 23 Greenfinch, gathered pre-roost not far from where I tried and failed to find Waxwings all winter. If memory serves, the most I've seen in the Garden is 11, so 23 is a good number indeed.

Back to the weekend wanders; Yarner on Saturday had a very showy male Siskin on a niger feeder and an annoyingly slippery female Brambling with some Chaffinches. Also yet another Roe Deer [[Tilly smelled it but didn't see it, I saw it but didn't smell it.. ;) ]]. Misty Mamhead on Sunday provided a couple of nice surprises; first a group of 54 Fieldfare flying over NE, then 2 Crossbill! I don't often see them around Haldon - having heard those two fly past a few minutes earlier, getting eyes on them when they came back was quite satisfying. Sunday night also gave me yet another nice surprise... More audiomig! :) Lying awake between bouts of trying to hold my lungs in, I heard the calls of a couple of waders flying over. Not a call I was familiar with; though they sounded a bit Greenshanky they weren't, if you get what I mean. I dragged myself out of bed and fired up BWPi, eventually finding them in the sound file 'Other calls' of Common Sandpiper. Patch Tick. :D

Right then, now for something completely different. Flint! Instead of trolling up to Chew to dip Kumlien's Gull [as I would have done if I was better] I went to Kents Cavern today. Been meaning to for a while now, as they have an exhibition on [called 'Cutting Edge' - who thinks up these things?] about stone tools throughout the ages, which looked interesting, especially as it was free! [[Hey, still unemployed here...]] Today was a particularly good day to go [despite it being half term and thus kid infested..] as they had a professional flint knapper in to do demonstrations of the art. The exhibition itself was a bit small and something of a sideshow on the way to the loos, but the knapper was great! Very nice chap called Karl Lee, able to give a talk that kept small children attentive while simultaneously knapping a handaxe out of a lump of flint that goes 'ding!' [Good flint goes 'ding!', just one of the many interesting things I learned].

Kents Cavern is his favourite place to give a demonstration, as while it's quite dark and the ceiling goes DRIP, it's also the only cave he can knap in [due to the concrete floor in the entrance chamber preventing his waste flint from contaminating the archaeology]. So you get the sounds last heard several thousand years ago echoing off the limestone... It was fascinating, so much so that I stayed around to see three demonstrations [two hand axes and an array of microliths]. I'd taken along the assortment of flint I've picked up over the last 20-odd years and he not only had a look at all of it [mostly strike-offs], but on seeing the best one [a Mesolithic microlith] he made one to match. :D It really was a pleasure to watch him, a guy clearly doing his dream job and with no small amount of skill. Eventually I tore myself away, though not before failing to resist buying an example of his work, a lovely ovate hand axe in Norfolk flint, which now sits next to my small and more accurately-labelled collection.

EDIT: Today [Wednesday, I think] I definitely feel better, but no birding yet as I have Things To Do [[as well as jobs to apply for and not get - that has been on-going*...]]. Oh well...

[[* As the saying goes; "If you can walk, you can work. If you can sit, you can apply for work!"]]

PYL: 90