I have purposely left camera 2 viewing the branch in the lake for a good part of today, as I have seen on my monitor the Kingfisher’s darting across the screen, so fast that if you blink you will miss them, and on quite a few occasions one has been landing on the branch. I say them, as I am convinced that there is a pair nesting in a bank behind the trees that you can see a small amount of on the left hand top corner of the screen. If they are where I think they are, they will nest there as many as three times in a season, laying up to seven egg each time. Their nest is normally a hole in the bank, that can be as much as two feet back from the entrance.
There are not many people who have been lucky to see a Kingfisher in the wild. I have only seen one twice on the farm, in the fourteen years that I have lived at Denbury. I have also seen them on a very quite stretch of the River Tone some years back. They are very territorial Birds. On pair would be the most you would see on a lake of our size, or on a river bank for us much as a mile. They will breed up to three times in a season, nesting in a hole in the bank, that will go back as far as two feet from the entrance. They will produce six to seven eggs in each clutch.
I really shouldn’t want them on the lake, as they will catch as many as twenty fish, as long as three inches in a day, between two of them, that is a large amount in the course of a year. They are another Bird that was persecuted, one because of the fish they caught, and fishermen would use their brightly coloured feathers for artificial flies, for fly fishing.
We sent five Ewe’s and Eighteen Lambs to market yesterday. It should have been eleven Ewes, but changed my mind about sending the six friendly Texel’s off. On getting back on the farm I realised that I had made a mistake. I will take them next Saturday. There are three Lambs unaccounted for. They may have got washed away in the flood. Tomorrow I will have to phone about and make sure that one of my neighbours has not seen them. After the outbreak of foot and mouth disease a few years back, there is an awful amount of paper work to do before you can send animals to market. I didn’t pursue it for long, for by all account’s the lady booking the sheep into the market, told us that we should not have used the vehicle we that we took them to market in. Cattle Markets are a depressing place. All of what we took to market looked lost, as did all the others that were there. After I sell this lot of Sheep, I wont be having any more.