Baffled by a bird RSPB website will help identify birds, and hedgehog café

If you are on holiday in the UK you may have time to watch the birds in a garden or park or even when driving along a motorway. Sometimes you are 'baffled by a bird'. I love the alliteration in the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) website. You can go there and try to track down your bird by answering a series of questions, starting with the size of the bird.

Hedgehogs
Other intriguing items on the site include building a hedgehog home.

I have lots of prickly friends but none of them are hedgehogs. We did have a hedgehog once. I ran off to get my camera but it had gone. Then I went to shut the kitchen door and found it hidden in the corner, with its nose into the corner, presumably for protection. I said, in a soothing tone,
"Hello, hedgehog, dear. I'm only here to help you. I can see you. I'm sure you can hear me. You are perfectly safe. Have a nice day."

Now, from the RSPB site, I know how to feed a hedgehog, and helpfully they warn that it will take two hours to build a hedgehog cafe. (You could even build one at home and take it with you on holiday.) The hedgehog cafe is basically a box of wood or plastic with a lid, a hole the right size, big enough for a hedgehog but not large enough for a fox or cat. (Yes, we were wondering about keeping them away.) Edging the hole to make it non scratch. Plus a water bowl. More details from the site.

Hedgehogs are mostly hibernating now. But if you are a procrastinator and it takes you three months from getting an idea to assembling all the materials and actually doing the job, or if, on the contrary, you are action man, women or child, and you like to be ready, now, well in advance, now is a good time to start thinking and acting reading for next spring and summer building your hedgehog home or hedgehog cafe.
https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/activities-pdfs/20-ways-pack.pdf

Bird photographs
Taking photos of birds is tricky. You need a tripod. And to get to know your mobile phone's multiple photo taking function. Practise it so you can act when you a p p r o a c h a bird so the camera keeps taking. You can also buy a close up attachment to fix on your phone. (Autocorrect changed my word to approved so I had to insert spaces.)

A close-up attachment for my phone so I can photograph birds. That's what I would like for Christmas or my birthday in the spring.

Most birds fly away as you approach, except robins.

How to photograph a rhea?
Better far and not too near!

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.