Swallows And Amazingly Loud Wasps.

It's August and guess what, it's raining. Peter left early this morning to drive down to Cambourne for another CISCO training day. He's just got home and although his knee is fine his elbow is causing him trouble.
I used the wet morning to do some school work, more progress tracking and I stuck the children's names on little cartoon cars which will be used on the class 'well done' chart. This time it's going to be a 'road' with the numbers 0 - 20. Every time we want to reward a child they move their car one space along the road and when they get to 20 they wear a badge and get a certificate. Last term they had balloons moving along clouds to the rainbow at no 10. It's a great way for the children to learn their numbers and number bonds and once the initial chart is put up it is very easy to use. As we are going to be learning about the local area I'm also going to put local photos at each of the even numbers, (more maths being slipped in). I also did a little DIY in the kitchen, filling in a channel which had been cut into the wall when we replaced all the copper water pipes with alkathene pipes. Next week I can replace the tiles that had to be removed ,up till now I've been hiding that messy corner with a wooden chopping board.
By mid-day the rain eased off and the temperatures started to rise. Back I went to the scree garden to carry on cleaning the slabs. I've found that Peter's wire brush that he uses for his barbecue is perfect for getting the moss off the slabs. The swallows were busying away and making a lot of noise so I decided to have another look at the nest. Today the youngsters were out of the nest and sitting on the beam next to it.

You can see that they are rather messy birds. The state of the floor below the nest is pretty nasty.

The young birds still have their baby mouths and the parents are kept busy flying in and out to keep their brood fed.

I had to use flash to get these pictures so they are probably rather dazzled by now.

I got a decent area of slabs cleaned up. Unfortunately the slabs were in the shade and I missed out on the bright sunshine that shone for a while. When I did call a halt to my work for a 'reading' break it wasn't quite so sunny. As I sat reading I heard a familiar scraping noise. I used to hear that noise in our London garden from the wooden fence 6 -8 ft away. It is amazing how loud one little wasp can be, scraping away the wood to make the pulp for a wasps' nest. Sure enough when I looked around I found a wasp scraping at a dry flower stalk. I'll have to send Romas to look around the outbuildings to make sure they aren't building a nest where it might prove a nuisance.