When we arrived here in France we noticed that, as in some previous years, a bird was nesting in one of the niches of the shrine room. The old barn has a lot of such niches in the wall, which were once the repositories for the ends of beams. They make perfect nest sites, usually for the black redstarts which are common around our buildings. This is probably the bird we have this year, but so far all we have seen is the feathered crown of a head and a beady eye.
The first time I took my camera into the shrine room, the bird was away from the nest, so I stood on a chair and used the zoom to capture the inside of the nest - five white eggs. I returned to the hall twenty minutes or so later and managed to photograph the bird on her nest. Coming out of the medtation hall, I then encountered a bright green lizard on the wooden bench outside. His amazing emerald colour was quite remarkable.
Walking down the garden I then found Jnanamati weeding the black currents: a bumper crop this year I hope as we have some new bushes, grown from cuttings made out of last year's prunings.
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