Garden Visitors

We are lucky to have a large garden and could spend hours watching visitors to it, butterflies and birds of several kinds, dragonflies and bees, robins and wrens, as well as red kites overhead making their daily circuits.

For some time now we have been listening to a pair of goldfinches singing at evening time, in the birch  tree of our neighbours.
Today I saw them flying back wards and forwards across our garden. Then one had a beak full of fluff. Maybe it was some of the fleece I had left out for nesting early in the year? No. They were collecting thistle down from one side of the garden and taking it to a very tall variegated shrub near the house. This shrub was blown over by the winter storms and is now propped up by several stout lengths of timber, in the hops that it may grow roots to stabilise itself before next winter.
After they had made many trips, collecting loads of fluff each time, I looked into the bush and saw a very small nest, smaller than a coffee cup, from below, looking rather like a mud ball and rather difficult to spot.

They seem to be resting now. After all it is a hot day. Or maybe she has started to lay her precious eggs.

Black birds and blue tits have reared their young in our hedges for some years, so perhaps now we have a third pair who will regularly build their nurseries on our patch. I very much hope so.