Manky Monkey Motors

Posted several lots of pics of wildlife in our garden here in Surrey.
Here's some more!
You can tell the pheasant shooting season's started -as soon as the guns start, they all come & hide in our garden.

Young Starling with a ring on his leg.

One of the many young Squirrels who call in for lunch. We often have 4 or 5 at a time.

.

Baby Bluetits a few weeks ago, demanding to be fed, even though the food's just a few inches from them. The parents work so hard, non stop all day, to keep them fed. They've had 2 or 3 clutches of eggs this year.

Yeah, we know the paving slabs are wonky, but we can't fix 'em -that's where the Mice & Voles live.

Dave, the Mouse.

They love the birds' peanuts.

Tanya smokes but I don't, so she spends a lot of time sat at the patio table. This is her mate, the female blackbird, who often joins her. When she was feeding babies, she'd cram as many yellow fat pellets as she could in her mouth before flying back to the nest -made her look like she had a big cartoon grin.  ;D

Curious young Bluetit.

Look very, very closely & you might make out the SparrowHawk in the middle of this shot, (bright yellow feet). It sits in the oak trees at the far end of the garden, waiting for unwary birds. I'm sure it thinks we provide a feathered lunch for it, in the same way we provide fat snax for the little ones. Young Starlings seem to be it's favourite.

A slightly bigger winged visitor. This is one of our neighbours, Paul, in his power glider/microlight thingy. He often buzzes over the garden on Summer evenings & sometimes calls on his mobile to say I can see your house from up here. 

some lovely pics there Andy n co
what camera do you use ?

Nikon D60 with a Tamron 55 - 200mm zoom lens.

cool i just got a early Xmas present a Sony DSLR A57
with a 55mm to 200mm lens  :)

Let's see whatcha got in your garden then.  :)

well its green  ::)

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c355/007mouse/DSC003712.jpg)

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c355/007mouse/DSC00206.jpg)

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c355/007mouse/DSC00199.jpg)

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c355/007mouse/DSC00183.jpg)

visited my dad who's been staying at a caravan in derbyshire this peacock wonders round the place

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c355/007mouse/DSC003281.jpg)

Nice pics. We've got a pair of Peacocks on the estate where we live. They roost in one of the big fir trees overnight -then frighten the life out of me by screeching at me when I walk past underneath.

andy youve nearly got a nature reserve
really great photos

we get no wildlife in ours having six dogs and flying hawks and falcons for years we dont get any visitors
shame

;D ;D ;D ;D

Yeah, that's our excuse for not doing the gardening -we're preserving the habitat for the wildlife. Honest.

I took some pics of our butterflies - not very many of them this year.

Small tortoiseshell - becoming rarer all the time.
Small white
Bees - we've had more different sorts of bees on this sedum than ever before

Unidentified spider
Sparrow - they used to be common then became uncommon but we've been glad to see quite a lot this year
Red Admiral - quite a few of these
The Peacock used to be the commonest in our garden but this is the only one we've seen this year

Fat furry bumblebee
Small Heath
Comma
Comma underwing showing the 'comma' mark it's named for

 :D Them's nice Bobbi.
Our buddleia bushes attract loads of flutterbys.

Chester had to get in the act
Small Copper

Why are you taking pictures instead of getting my tea?

We were seriously worried because the buddleias were almost over this year before any butterflies appeared.

Small copper.

Nothing for reference - you could be fooling us, might be a large copper!

 ;D

had two rowdy black felllers in my yard this morning!

1 staffy and 1 labradore

 ;D
Sometimes animals escape from their fields near us. We don't have a fence at the end of our garden so it leads straight out into the 800 acre estate we live on. I wandered down the garden one day to find a black face peering at me round the edge of the shed. A bunch of cattle had escaped & were busy trampling & eating anything they could find. They've got loose a couple of times -just a few weeks after moving to the country from my little studio flat in the middle of a town, I found myself helping to round up 50 cattle that had got out onto the busy A246 Guildford to Dorking Road. Suddenly I'm a cowboy!
We've also found hoof prints in the lawn after horses have got loose. Life's never dull here.  :P