Gimswood

Coloured leaves! Coloured berries! What a beautiful autumn this was in Gimswood. It even hung on late so some leaves will go into the winter frosts.

There has not been a huge amount of rain. The scrapes and ponds have at last filled up, but need more from the winter rains to be properly full. The cracks in the ground from the drying clay throughout summer are still there, though perhaps not quite as big. I still wonder how Toby has managed to not break a leg down some of them.

Snipe have returned from wherever they breed; I counted 9 a couple of days running. I wish they would breed here, but now they are so rare they can be really picky about their sites. The geese tried it on Square Pond and produced one gosling, a cute little chap. But we do not know what happened after that because one week they were there and the next they were gone, and the gosling did not yet have adult feathers. Maybe the fox caught it, but there were no feathers to show for that story. Anyway, would a fox withstand the inevitable onslaught of two protective adult Canada geese?

We had a few visitors this year, who are always surprised at the rate of tree growth. One even saw a couple of deer. I know that deer are there occasionally but the damage really is minimal, unlike the Viburnum beetle damage. Say no more on that.

Some visitors planted a special tree grown by a special person who died shortly after. So that red horse chestnut will be watched with care. And maybe she will be watching us to make sure that we do!