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| What’s going on here then? |
As we entered our fifth week of lockdown, we learnt last
night that the next extension is for a further four weeks until 11th
May. No doubt there will be a gradual
relaxing of restrictions at some point, but it is looking increasingly unlikely
we will be allowed to cruise for a few months yet ☹
Like most other countries, the French salute their key workers every night at 8.00pm with hand clapping, horn tooting, flag waving etc. We join in on our boats by tooting the horns
and waving flags with the residents in the cottages on the other side of the
port.
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| Gorete & me flag waving while Nikki & Karen were horn tooting |
A recent drawback of the lockdown is that recycling
collections have been stopped and all recycling has to go into the general
waste. Although we believe we avoid
buying products with excess packaging, it never ceases to amaze us the amount
of recycling that still builds up while living on a narrowboat.
One more thing to mention about the lockdown: we had another
visit from the police this week. As with
a previous week it was while the girls were doing pontoon pilates. Once again, they gave the girls a thumbs up
and let them carry on. Either someone
had reported the activity or the policemen just wanted to watch them 😉
People walking past the port on the
other side of the wall can see over and, we imagine, are probably quite jealous
that we have a secluded area to sit out in compared with those that live in
flats in the town. They tend to acknowledge
us with a ‘bonjour’ and a wave, but we have noticed a couple of people taking
pictures.
We were still getting some people walking illegally through the
park each day so spent some time this week making the council barriers more
robust. This seems to have helped and
only two or three people manage to get through each day now.
Encouraged by the lack of human activity the waterline next
to us has become a haven for the herons in our heronry. For the last couple of days we have been
watching them vie for fishing places and line up along the bank. Most of the day we can count eight of them,
although this morning we could see nine while having breakfast - a far more pleasing sight than the fishermen that used to sit along this stretch.
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| Karen pretending to be on heron-watch |
Looking at the picture above, the heronry is in the trees on the island to the right and
the herons line up to fish along the waterfront of the park on the left right along to the edge of
our pontoon. Karen has threatened, when
she finds the time, to get the camera out and hopefully get some good shots of
the herons.
Whilst on wildlife, Karen has also been taking a keen
interest on a pair of swans nest building just up from the river lock when
going for her early morning walk. They
have now finished building and are taking turns to incubate the eggs. Swans are unusual in sharing this activity as
it falls to the female for most waterfowl.
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| The resident port swans |
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| Orange Tip egg on the underside of a garlic mustard (aka hedge mustard) leaf |
If you look for Orange Tip eggs, you will rarely find more
than one per plant as the caterpillars are (unusually) cannibalistic. As well as searching for them on garlic
mustard plants they can also be found on cuckoo flower (aka lady's smock), their other food plant.
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| Garlic mustard in flower |
Orange Tips belong to the pieridae or white family of
butterflies to which the infamous ‘cabbage whites’ belong. Actually, there is no such butterfly as a
cabbage white; it is a term used for the few butterflies whose caterpillars
feed on cabbage type plants (brassica).
In the UK and northern France these are the Small White and the Large
White. Unfortunately, there are several
other whites that do not feed on these plants, but they still get killed by
over-zealous gardeners and allotment holders.
This is a male Green Veined White taken by our lock yesterday showing
the distinctive green veins on its underwings.
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| Male Green Veined White |
I know the pedants and purists among you may well be cringing
about my capitalization of the butterfly names above. It is something that I don’t usually do but I
feel that it makes it easier to read and understand, especially when talking
about small and large whites.
On Saturday evening Guy dropped off a basket of easter eggs
on all the occupied boats that Ardon had kindly made up.
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| Our easter eggs from Guy & Ardon |
I must admit that I have now run out of excuses to not get
on with touching up the boat paintwork. This week I have prepped a couple of sections
of the roof (there are six altogether) and managed to get as far as applying
the first undercoat. The spell of fine
weather over the last three weeks that finally spurred me on has also encouraged
our seeds to germinate. We now have
sweet pea and nasturtium seedlings but are still waiting for the chillies to
emerge.
The girls came back from their daily walk one day full of
excitement. They believed they had found
some undiscovered painted manhole covers to add to our collection. After a quick check we found that three of
them were new bringing our total to 82, no wonder they were excited!
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| One of the newly discovered covers |
Back to the picture at the top asking what was going
on. We get the occasional dead animal
floating slowly past us and, with a little nudging using a barge pole or boat hook, we
manage to help them on their way towards the lock and therefore out of smelling
range. Not only do they smell badly but
we worry the dogs will show an interest so that’s another reason for getting
rid of them. We call them bombs as they
swell up and we have to be very careful not to poke them too hard and make them
explode ☹ This week our visiting bomb was a hedgehog which
stubbornly hung around for a couple of days.
In the end Gorete and I fished it out and took it into the park to bury
it out of harms way:
To finish this week’s update, here is a picture of Ellis now
he is four months old.
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