Hello again
We’ll start off with animals this month—I was passing the stream near Milton, when a slight movement caught my eye—a squirrel in the stream?—no, not a squirrel, but a stoat! He (she) was 
having a drink, but shot away quickly when it saw me. I was very pleased to see it, because one rarely sees a stoat. Ray tells me he saw not one, but four deer in the lower mead field the other day.
Back to birds—I always take a look into the village stream when I”m passing by. The grey wagtails are about again, and I was 
lucky enough to see a dipper in the stream one day in late October. If you don’t know the dipper, it about blackbird sized, has dark plumage, but with a large pure white round mark on its breast. It stays beside fast flowing water. Indeed, dippers walk along the bottom of streams to find food. It gets its name from its characteristic habit of bobbing up and down quickly, ie. dipping. Or, is it because it “dips” in the water?
Anne tells me she has seen a kingfisher in her garden pond—how lucky!. There was a green woodpecker climbing up Nan’s tree trunk. Green woodies are normally seen here in Summertime, digging for ants in the grass, so its good to have them in late Autumn. The great spotted woodies are back in our garden—one returned to a feeder several times yesterday! The last time I walked down to Milton, one flew into a tall tree, followed by a jay, which landed very 
close to it. Ther was a scuffle, and the jay flew away quickly—woodies have got very powerful beaks! I heard my first winter thrush cackling overhead. Looking up, I saw there were several of them in the sky. These are the fieldfares, our Winter visitors from Scandinavia. We usually get hundreds of them every 
Winter, and they stay around, feeding on the windfall apples in Angus’s orchard.
Alan
