I hope you have had a great pancake day, Ski week or just a nice half term break. We’ve been spoilt by the lovely weather. But it has been very cold, so the feeders have been emptying rapidly. We had a new visitor last month in the shape of a Hawfinch. Hawfinches are apparently red listed and very hard to spot in the UK but in Switzerland they are quite common.

The powerful beak can break cherry stones which need 40Kg of pressure.

The crested tits are also back in town.

Green finches have been appearing too.

In spite of several returns to the Versoix woods I’ve still had no luck photographing the black woodpecker. I hope this doesn’t become my Moby Dick. We did see a couple of groups of deer, two boars and a fox. I was so delighted to get a reasonable picture of the deer, that I’d covered my lens, thereby missing the boar and the fox! Grrr.

We thought we saw some thrushes in the distance at Versoix too, but the pictures are not “conclusive”. Maybe when I catch the black woodpecker I’ll get lucky with them too.

The Magpie is all alone this year. More worried about eating than mating so far….

And finally I couldn’t resist sharing this shy chaffinch. For once he’s in the light and you can see some of his splendid colours.