Something unusual...

... And nothing whatever to do with renovating a house. But I had to put this picture up. I found this chap yesterday, sitting at the bottom of a field on farmland near the house when I was walking the dog. It clearly couldn't fly and the weather was horrible, so I thought I'd better do something by way of animal rescue type stuff. I stood for a while admiring the many razor-sharp points on most of its extremities and decided the best course of action was to drop my coat over it and try to pick it up and get it home. To my relief, that worked perfectly. And to my further relief, it didn't go to the toilet during the 20 minute walk home. Not something you'd want in your coat I'd imagine. I managed to confine it at the end of our shed and we put down some water and raw mince, which it politely refused. Today we took it to the RSPCA animal rescue centre at West Hatch in Somerset where they identified it as a juvenile Osprey, which had obviously got into trouble on its first migration from Sweden to Africa, ending up in a muddy field in Devon.


I will certainly be following up on its progress, and if all goes well, we'll be invited along to its release back into the wild whenever that happens. I'll keep you posted on any news.