Just got home at 16:35 from another busy afternoon (which might explain the lack of blog posts recently), to see a BAT fly around the garden in the gloom!

I occasionally see winter bats, in fact I saw a few with my eldest boy two years ago almost to the day, but they're pretty rare things.

The last few days have been bananas though, weather-wise, haven't they? 16 Centigrade? At the very end of December? Come off it?!

Actually this is relatively worrying. Not only is this becoming a trend (see again this post two years ago), plants (especially) and many animals NEED the cold for a few weeks. I hope trees don't start budding etc soon, as any new growth will almost certainly be killed by the frosts and cold "snap" if and when we get one.

Our hedgehogs seemed to start to hibernate in the fourth week of December this year (so around the 22nd). I wonder if they're already getting a bit warm and restless and we'll see them on the hedgehog cam again this week?

One other recent garden point to note - we've recently had a big, beautiful buzzard alight (for the first time that I've seen) IN our garden a week or three ago (photos below).

Finally - Ben (my eldest boy) made the end of his "around the birds in eighty aves" challenge tonight.  We were lucky enough to see a few goosander the other day on a local lake and then accidentally flush a beautiful woodcock from the 2nd hole at Greys Green golf course in Oxfordshire the other day... those were his one-hundredth-and-first and one-hundred-and-second species of this year's challenge. 102 it is then. Which he hopes to beat next year.

OK.

That better be it for now.

Happy New Year, grapple-fans.

Let's all hope (I'm sure) for a far better, far healthier 2022 eh?

TBR and family... and jays...