Just starting to go over now, but… it’s wild garlic time round here. I think I may like wild garlic even more than bluebells - this was on the way to my favorite swamp this morning:
The smell was fabulous.
Still haven’t seen any ducklings yet. Cracking photos, BTW, @merrick.
j
Yesterday I was driving down a smaller street in downtown San Jose. In a semi-demolished old parking lot on my right was a pile of rubble and chunks of old asphalt. As I drove past, I saw out of the corner of my eye a movement on top of the pile. I looked, and it was a peregrine falcon standing at the summit, and he had a rat clutched in one foot, and was hopping around trying to keep his balance, with his pointed wings outstretched. What a pretty little raptor!
And that’s funny - I thought peregrines only preyed on other birds, and in flight.
Overwhelmingly. But while some raptors will just go after anything that moves (great horned owls are the classic example), even the specialists will occasionally veer off menu if an opportunity presents itself. At that peregrine nest I linked to above in seven years they have seen exactly one rat being brought to the nest. So they will take mammals at times, just quite rarely. You saw a fairly unusual occurrence 
.
Today as I was looking out of the landing window, musing on the weather in a scowly sort of way, a greater spotted woodpecker flew past and landed on the trunk of a tree, just up the road. Brilliant!
A couple of years back we had a pair nesting nearby. Maybe we have them back again?
j
After a lunch of fresh, young turtle, young eagle has been standing that the edge of the nest, looking down and stretching one wing at a time. Exciting times!
I’ve been hearing the repeated whistling of dove wings in our backyard. The last time I heard that was last year, when a pair was trying to nest in our backyard trees.
I went and checked it out. A male dove was trying to build a nest on the angle of the downspout from our rain gutters. The angle was not sharp enough to “catch” the twigs, so every twig he put on there slid off and landed on our patio. There were dozens of fallen twigs just below the drain spout of just the right length and size to make a good nest. But first he had to make them stick, and he was too architecturally challenged to do that. He did, however, sit nearby and coo enticingly for a couple of days. If he did lure a hen dove, I’m sure she took a look at his nesting attempts and then moved on.
Pigeons and doves are lousy nest builders. Your observations are typical.
I know I’ve quoted him somewhere before, but Gerald Durrell said it best:
“Four or five twigs laid across a branch - that’s the average pigeon’s idea of a highly complicated structure.”
A friend of mine breeds white homing pigeons that he uses for funeral releases. He gives breeding pairs clay drainage dishes that go under flower pots. They make excellent nests.
Baby ring-necked snake, about six inches long, pretending to be a stick. He let me take his picture and then squiggled away. 
We have wall lights on our balcony that are glass boxes with a slanted glass top. Dang, if those dumb pigeons keep trying to build a nest on that slanted glass.
I was sitting outside just now browsing on my phone and I noticed a large black ant on my left hand. There was a tiny flying insect, smaller than the ant’s head, bobbing around the ant like the ant was holding a tiny balloon (It was definitely orbiting the ant and not two unrelated insects that were coincidentally near my hand.) I quickly but carefully moved the phone to my right hand, desperately hoping to get video of the action, but the ant was visibly panicked and quickly jumped off my hand.
I know that there are parasitic wasps in some areas that inject their eggs into some species of ants, but I don’t know if we have them here in South Carolina, and from what I could tell of it, it looked more yellow and bee-shaped. So I don’t know what was going on, but it was the first time I’ve ever witnessed it.
On the sandy cliffs just north of Quiberon in Brittany we watched sand martins catching flying insects for a quarter hour. Great.
Also in the last few days, saw little egrets and heard a cuckoo two nights in a row.
j
Interesting. Did it look like this? (Video at top of page.)
Pretty much.
The poor ants in that video. However, their reactions and postures are practically human. If they could speak, it would be:
“Yeowtch! What the bloody hell bit me in the ass?!? Sonofabitch, there’s no one there.”
I’ve seen bats at our nectar feeders in the past. Judging by the way the nectar levels drop overnight I am assuming that they are still visiting, but I don’t stay up that late that often anymore.
I swear I saw the ant jump in the air. But googling tells me that (most) ants can’t jump, so…
In nature I saw:
Does a naked man on a gravestone count?
A Montezuma Oropendola. Two of ‘em, several kilometers apart, in the Mixe-speaking region of Oaxaca state, Mexico — but the hot, moist lowland part no one ever visits, along the edge of the coastal plain that’s mostly in Veracruz state.
It’s rather like a toucan, but with a serrated beak. It’s its own thing, really.
I so wish Colibri were here to share in my fun. 