This time of the year is a joy. Driving back home as the sun sets can be glorious and like tonight provide some wonderful photographic opportunities. I took these images of rooks at the nest in the village Wick St Lawrence. More of a hamlet really on the flatlands between Weston super Mare and Clevedon. I'd photographed these birds last week using my mobile but tonight having my camera I stopped to take some better ones. As I snapped away a lady came out from the farm after having fed her horses. We had a chat. She'd lived here for 37 years and described the huge changes as this once isolated hamlet became ever closer to the new estates creeping out from Weston, now less than 2 miles away. Anyway she was curious to know why I was photographing the rooks as she gets fed up with their cawing all day. And that made me realise that wildlife is not always welcome when it's on your doorstep. An interesting part of the conversation was that when they moved there starlings were almost a pest, and hardly any corvids. Today it has reversed, rooks nesting in the village for the last 10 years plus many jackdaws and magpies, yet the poor starling is a rarity now. Wrens too are increasing, with house sparrows plentiful. The ebb and flow of natural populations. But as I chatted to her I looked up and above our heads rook nests and the moon through the bare branches. A perfect early spring vision.
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