A day of spring, a day of rain...

Hiya again
Yesterday was one of the best days yet this season: balmy, a fait breeze that dried the sheets on the washing lines, the neighbourhood ringing with the sound of a chainsaw and, once that had fallen silent, filled with the voices of birds and of children enjoying their first proper day off school... Fairly peaceful.
I was raised in Protestant Switzerland where Good Friday is one of the holiest days of the year, meaning that pretty much everything comes to a standstill. So it's still a bit of an experience to find that on the West Coast of Scotland Good Friday is a day like just about any other: the post is delivered, shops are open, people hang their laundry out to dry if the weather is good.Well, being an agnostic who no longer cares about church festivals, I appreciate shops are open so I could make the most of a lovely day by taking myself to the nearby garden centre, which has been holding a sale.

I bought three tall terracotta pots for less than £10 each, as well as plants to go into them (3 for the price of 2), and bags of compost (4 for the price of 3 -- I'll be in compost for a good while!). The pots now adorn yellow patches in the drying green. The patches are the result of the next-door neighbour's white boxer peeing again and again and again through the wire-mesh fence. I spoke to its owner but she shrugged it all off, saying it cannot be trained, which is rubbish! Mind you, I quite like her so I wasn't going to make a fuss.

(photo taken a couple of days later, on 4 Apr 2010, when the sun was out again)

We'll see whether the new arrangement will make a positive difference. I hope so.
The pots contain one red gooseberry and two raspberry shrubs. I will have to build some sort of support for the rasps, eventually, and some kind of shelter to keep them out of the worst of the north-easterly that sometimes comes bearing down the glen with a nasty, cold bite.
Still, I feel well pleased with myself for having brought this project to some sort of conclusion. There are too many still hanging about unfinished (the yellow shed, for one, which I have been meaning to paint a yummy purple -- it will happen, promise).
In stark contrast to yesterday, today has been grey and wet and quite cold.
Some neighbours in this terrace if not in this close toss pieces of bread out into the drying green. They have been attracting large jackdaws. I managed to capture two of them through my closed window this morning:While I love their plumage that shimmers green and blue in the sun, I'm not sure they are the kinds of birds we want in our gardens, where I've lately been observing the odd wren, several bluetits and a couple of robins.

Dolphins in Oban Bay

Hiya

My nephew H. arrived on Monday evening and we've been doing quite a few things I've long been meaning to do but never got round to doing. One of them was sea kayaking, which we did yesterday. Brilliant! Exhausting, too, but I will definitely go back for more. We had a good, full-on day of it, being out on the water for about five hours, including two very short stops and one longer lunch break. The sea was benign, the sky covered and so we ended up just practicing strokes but not getting roasted in the process.
This afternoon we went to see The End of the Line, a documentary about the dire state of the world's oceans due to massive overfishing. Estimates range from a decline in fish stocks over the past twenty, thirty years of between seventy and ninety per-cent. Unless our politicians change track, we're heading for a complete collapse of fish stocks all over the world.
So, it was doubly gratifying to see a large pod of dolphins play in Oban Bay this evening. We watched them -- I would estimate their number to be at least eight to maybe fourteen, maybe even more -- from the Esplanade beach. At 8:10 we caught the wee blue ferry that runs between the South Pier and Oban Marina on Kerrera and got right up close to a few of them wheeling and jumping out of the water.
Of course, me being me, I didn't have the camera with me. But there were dozens and dozens of people watching the dolphins with us, and many sightings of them have been reported in Oban Bay over the past few weeks.
We were wondering whether they were bothered by quite a number of inflatables motoring out to where they were. They seemed to jump a lot more when a boat was approaching and tended to move away. I would suspect that boats chase the fish away these dolphins are evidently hunting. If I was them, I would deeply resent the noisy intrusion of fast-moving boats. But if they were that bothered, they probably wouldn't choose to live in the bay.
And according to posts on the Mara Mhor blogsite, dolphins seem to actually run out to "play" with certain boats.
It would be great if anyone who photographed these gorgeous creatures recently could get in touch and perhaps send their photograph. I'd gladly post them here and give the artists credit for their work (and I'll make sure I carry my camera, no matter how silly that may look -- I've missed so many great shots because I felt having a camera with me was inappropriate/too clumsy/...).
In the meantime, it has grown quite dark out there but the large flock of jackdaws (Corvus monedula) that have taken up residence in the nearby trees are still not quite settled for the night. This morning they were up teaching their young how to fly at just after 4am -- first light just dawning. I'm beginning to understand some of their behaviour: I've seen an older bird with a smaller one following close behind and a gentle, slightly metallic clacking sound flying between them. It does sound as though there's a lot of questions and answers going back and forth between the birds. But when they're all up in the air, wheeling and swooping about, the noise is almost deafening. A fantastic sight, though, and quite a number of us living in this neighbourhood enjoy the spectacle of an evening and have a good chinwag among ourselves about them.
Night now! and may it be a peaceful one for all of you out there.