Egret surprise

Clouds and intermittent drizzle throughout the day. Mournful weather perhaps? The King was in Northern Ireland. Cardiff is gearing up for his visit on Friday to Llandaff Cathedral and the Senedd. Will we see him arrive in Pontcanna Fields by helicopter I wonder? I hope to be out there with my camera.

Clare's study group arrived for a two hour session at ten, so I confined myself to upstairs, tinkering with my Linux laptop, working out how to download and install an operating system upgrade without losing its data. I couldn't get the in built data backup program to work at all. No idea why. I slipped out for a walk around Llandaff Fields, and when I returned, cooked lunch.

Then I had more work to do on the eulogy for Thursday's funeral, before going out with Clare for a walk down to Blackweir. To my surprise we saw three egrets close by - a solitary one near the weir and a couple on the edge of the bank down-river. A solitary one I've seen up-river near the Western Avenue bridge several times this year, but this is the first time I recall seeing egrets in this vicinity. I wonder why? Normally egrets are found a couple of miles up-stream by Fforest Farm and Radyr Weir. The only thing that's different is the much lower level of water in the river. Has that affected their food supply?

After supper, I watched the last episode of 'Redemption' with the crime exposed and offenders paying the price outside the judicial system accidentally, but then there as a coda about the importance of family life and bonds, how these can be can forged voluntarily, not just a matter of genetic kinship. Italy, like most other countries in Europe has experienced a decline in family life, decreasing fertility, impermanence in relationships, work and career demands forcing people to live further away from each other, weakening natural bonds of affection, so that kin become more like acquaintances. In a sense the whole story reflected that sense of how much and how little we may know about each other.

This was followed by the last of Michael Portillo's travelogue series walking coast to coast along the Pyrenees, reflecting on his father's escape from Spain to France during the Civil War. He met several interesting people, including an organic wine grower and a breeder of native tortoises that have become a threatened species whose decline is partly due to them being rounded up and used as domestic pets, out of an environment in which they can breed and flourish. Now they are too thin on the ground to reproduce in the wild, and have to be bred in captivity and then released. They're all micro-chipped so that they can be identified when found in the wild, giving researchers and idea of how far they spread from where they are released. Fascinating.