Christmas 2012 and a Happy New Year

Apologies for being so slack with the blogging over the last few months. We both sadly lost our fathers recently so motivation has been very hard to find lately!
However, a new year brings lots of new projects, so we need to dig deep and get ourselves back on track!
We had a good Christmas. As usual, lots of home produce and everyone mucked in with preparations- picking a pine tree for the house, making and decorating the Xmas cake, home-grown sausages and freshly baked bread for breakfast, and of course the multi-bird roast!

above- Christmas cake decorated by the girls

                                  below- home-made sausages from our half wild boar pigs

Pauls been making fresh bread pretty much every day!

We went for a four bird this year to keep things a little bit more simple and it was probably our best yet!

After the birds were prepared- goose, duck, cockerel and turkey (still havent produced our own turkeys- but maybe next year!) they were de-boned and then wrapped up with a bacon, apricot, almond and parmesan stuffing (with lots of fresh herbs - sage and thyme and some lemon rind)

 

We witnessed a few amazing sunsets aswell this Christmas, and some unusual skies with rings around the moon on a couple of nights (trust my family to think it was aliens! obviously had too much vinho!)

So now we move into 2013 and hopefully a good year. The birdlife seems to be getting better every year, and thanks to leaving some olives on the trees outside the house windows we've been able to see loads of birds- particularly Song thrushes, which the Portuguese hunters are allowed to shoot at this time of year, so we're extremely happy to see them here!
We've spent the last two Sundays doing some clearing and putting up more birds boxes. We've made a selection suitable for tits and thrushes, blackbirds and nuthatches. We found loads of info. on the RSPB Liverpool site http://www.rspbliverpool.org.uk/helping.htm

              Below- Song Thrush eating olives in the tree outside the kitchen window

Paul and myself up trees!    -  a week on and the new boxes are already being checked out!

                                  Below- the geese having a wander about in the January sunshine