Festive birds and tree lichen

Robin (Erithacus rubecula) at Dunraven on Christmas Day 2016

When it’s fine on Christmas Day we often go to Dunraven Castle at Southerndown in the Vale of Glamorgan to eat pâté and pickle sandwiches in the walled garden – our main meal of roast beef and Brussels sprouts is in the evening. This year the weather was good, with a cold, brisk wind that kept the cloudy sky interesting.

This shelter in the walled garden is where we eat our sandwiches

The view as we ate lunch

There is always a robin around – we like to think it’s the same one time after time, but maybe not, as they live for only a couple of years

It was probably my imagination, but this robin seemed to have a redder breast than the robins in our garden – and it was singing its lovely song much quieter than our city birds.

The robin was very tame and waited at our feet while we dropped crumbs of wholemeal bread

I took many more pictures at Dunraven Castle on Christmas Day 2014 and you can see the pictures here. There were primroses in flower that day, and there were again, but I didn’t bother to photograph them. Here are just a couple of features I snapped this time…

Dipping pond used by Victorian gardeners to water the plants

Iris – probably Iris foetidissima or stinking gladwin

Cheerful flowers of Bergenia – probably Bergenia crassifolia, also known as cordifolia

Lichen on an old apple tree in the walled garden

Japanese aralia – Fatsia japonica

Glossy Fatsia leaf

Another view of one of the walled gardens at Dunraven

Beyond several walled gardens, connected by doors or archways, you come out into woodland…

Woodland garden

It’s damp, with dead leaves under foot and ferns on the banks

Hart’s-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)

There was a wonderful vivid green lichen on some of the trees…

…more lichen…

…same again…

…a closer look – can anyone identify it for me? It seems to be a sterile crustose lichen – and possibly those white powdery areas are soredia? I’ve looked at the http://www.britishlichens.co.uk/ website but can’t quite pin it down – perhaps a Pertusaria?

The trees were, I think, sycamore, or another species of maple.

Leaves like sycamore under foot…

…and sycamore or maple keys

A flatter area of the woods near the top of the cliffs

As we neared the cliff edge we saw a kestrel (Falco tinnunculus)

I couldn’t catch a good picture, but I think this is enough to identify it as a kestrel – which I always call a windhover after the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that describes it so well

The Windhover
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shèer plòd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermilion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The kestrel was hovering over the edge of the cliff and beyond is one of my favourite views…

View from Dunraven along the South Wales Jurassic Coast

I love the Jurassic Coast so much that I will save my other Christmas Day pictures for another blog post…

Happy New Year!

Also see:
Southerndown December 2014
Southerndown December 2013