The jay has become a regular visitor to our garden over the last month – even appearing on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. He seems particularly fond of the peanuts I regularly leave out for the squirrel.

The jay has become a regular visitor to our garden over the last month – even appearing on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. He seems particularly fond of the peanuts I regularly leave out for the squirrel.
Last week I chanced to look out into our garden and saw this wonderful jay. I was taken a bit by surprise as we’ve never had one in the garden before but it was lovely to see it hopping around the trees and even taking a big chunk out of the fat balls!
Stonebridge City Farm has been a lovely place to visit during all sorts of iterations of lockdown in England. They’ve lost a lot of money having to keep opening and then closing again so if you could donate a little something here that would be great. My last visit pre-Christmas was to see their new calf – Orion – as well as some of the other photogenic residents.
Over the gloriously sunny Early May Bank Holiday weekend I paid a trip to Stonebridge City Farm to see the lambs, but they also had some young calves and a seriously inquisitive cockerel.
The deer at Wollaton Hall are currently rutting so I thought that would be a good opportunity to take some photographs (being mindful not to get too close, of course!) Below are some of the photos I captured of the stags, plus geese and swans around the lake.
Africa Alive! is a wildlife park in Suffolk; purchased in 1991 it is part of the Zoological Society of East Anglia, along with its sister organisation Banham Zoo. They have around 1,000 species from Africa over 100 acres of parkland and we ended up spending the entire day there, finding much to explore from animals we were familiar with to those we were decidedly not.