Blissful summer days.. & we've converted a horse trailer to a bathroom!

View from our bath

This summer we have had the utter joy of having a bathroom! It's luxury and I can't believe we've done without one for so long.
We got our horse trailer and bath from Ebay, the water (immersion tank) is Leo's mum's old one, complete with lagging and Leo made the woodburner from an old & large 47kilo gas bottle. Very satisfying.. Leo will be writing up how he made the woodburner soon hopefully!

We've not got round to decorating yet.. too busy having baths!

It takes under 2 hours to heat up the water, which is about 120ltrs and one burner load of wood. We use the water for bathing, laundry and washing up. I can't quite express how much better it makes us feel, psychologically it's like a weight's been lifted.

Toilet Tit

This wee fledgling and her buddy live in our compost loo every night. The first I noticed her was when she made a deposit on my foot while I was making my own, erm, deposit...

Dora

Dear friends, I'd like you to meet the new love of my life, Dora. She is a Dutch Bantam chicken who was rescued, covered in blood, underweight and weak, by my pal Luisa. Dora has an horrific injury on the back of her neck, as you can see below...

Dora's injury is healing very well

I don't know what it is about chickens but their spirit and their innocent adventuring always melts my heart, that and the fact it ony takes a few gentle strokes, purring sounds and some apple to get them to trust the big smelly oafs that us humans are.

Dora and her new best friends, Bubbles (in front) and Heidi (in back)

I could cry with joy at the sight of this. Dora and her new perch pals off out exploring, adventuring and bringing destruction to many red soldier beetles in the meadow.

My office

 Above is my makeshift office (bizarrely minus a stool in this picture!). I'm so lucky I can sit outside to work, I do a lot of office based stuff for the Save Our Woods campaign that would drive me batty if I had to sit in the yurt to do. Phew :)

A male Golden ringed dragonfly resting on a hazel

Our river meadow, coppice and woodland edge is a magical place to be at the moment. Full of butterflies, roe and red deer, dragonflies, adders, passing otters, too many species of bird for me to list here and lots and lots of wildflowers...

Silverwashed fritillary

Leo and I went butterfly hunting the other day and spent an hour or so surrounded by crazy Silverwashed fritillary's. They've done so well this year, much better than our Small pearl bordered fritillary's. I still find it exciting to watch the Silverwashed fritillary's in flight, they fly so strongly and of course are very territorial so everynow and again you get a brilliant fight kick off!

Silverwashed fritillary feeding on bramble

Something I hadn't noticed before I saw these photos was the raised strip on each wing. If you look at the first picture of the fritillary above you can see that there is what looks like a lighter coloured short strip on each wing, in the photo above you can see that those strips are raised. Wonder if that's aeronautical design?! Anyone know?

Thank you to the lovely Ceri for introducing me to the world of the hammock and snorkeling. The hammock forces me to relax and snorkeling, well, what can I say about snorkeling? It's other wordly and a magical experience. Here's a youtube video from a couple of random strangers that are snorkeling where Ceri took me snorkeling... blissful!

hen xx

Bee Draggled & other beautiful things...

I rescued a Bumble bee from drowning! I scooped him out of a trug of water and held him in my hand, in the sun, till he started to move.  Then I gave him some of our local Exmoor honey. He started scoffing straight away! He's almost dry now & fuelled up ready to fly away!

Even in his bee-draggled state he was beautiful. It felt amazing having him crawl on my hand. I've never been stung by anything before (not including cleg bites!), so it doesn't worry me holding a bee.  I know as long as I'm calm, gentle & my movements are slow it's very unlikely I'll get stung.

**UPDATE**

The bumble bee has flown away & some opportunistic honey bees are helping themselves to the Exmoor honey I left out! I caught these two, tongues out, lapping it up!

Our meadow is amazing at the moment. The grasses have gone a crazy pink & red hue! No idea what variety of grass this is or why it's this colour! If anyone knows I'd love to learn.

This is another pic of a meadow brown butterfly.  It's different to the one I posted on here the other day. You can see clearly the crazy circular markings on the underside of the wings. So pretty.

Well, the ducklings are coming on strong, growing at least an inch a day! Believe me I know, I've been measuring them *blush*! I had to share this picture as they were both using their stumpy, un-developed, wings to rest their beaks under! Sweeeet :)

My gorgeous friend Lizzie came to stay with me for a few days. It was very restful & we explored Watersmeet.  It was a stunning day & the woods were looking amazing. I ate too many bilberrys on the path & spent the evening.. well.. I'll leave it at that... ahem..

:)

hen xx