Why couldn’t the viper viper nose?

Because the adder adder ‘ankerchief! 😆 😆

Today we were All About The Nature. We went to the monthly Home Ed meetup at Pulborough Brooks. Heavy rain was forecast but the day dawned sunny and bright so we packed a picnic and headed off, listening to LSoH music and singing loudly. Tarly took a spotter sheet, Davies decided not to and we quickly caught up with a couple of other HE families there. One of the girls quickly spotted a lizard so we all crowded round to have a look and that rather set the tone for the day. We saw newts, birds aplenty, rabbits, deer, a cow acting like she might have been in labour and then the highlight of the day, some adders.

I’ve never seen adders before and having googled and found out a bit more about them realised what I did know was sketchy. I have always thought that in the UK we have grass snakes, adders and vipers. I know realise adders are vipers. Clearly when I was a child someone told me you could get adders or vipers in the UK using both names and I took that as two species rather than two names for the same snake. I also learnt from googling that adders birth live young rather than laying eggs.

We saw a male, a female and then Maisie spotted the fabulous sight of two males doing their dancing display. The kids and I had seen some tropical snakes doing similar on a nature programme recently so knew it was a sort of fight to push each other to the ground with the victor forcing his opponent down and getting to be the one to mate with the female. They were utterly unbothered by their audience of small children, adults and various blokes with cameras getting very excited at their antics 🙂

It was a nice walk; Davies, Scarlett, Maisie and I walked the last bit together and had nice chats. I quite like being with a group of children, they make interesting conversation :).

We had lunch in the park there and left when a huge grey cloud finally reached directly overhead. As we pulled out of the carpark so it started to hail so we certainly had the best of the weather. 🙂

We went straight to the library where Davies’ display was needing to be put up again at Lancing having been at Shoreham for the last two weeks.

Scarlett selected a whole pile of picture books and then I showed them where books about snakes were so we picked up a pile of those too and then came home.

Scarlett spent some time with her make up box drawing eyes on the back of everyone’s hands like the women on Saturday’s Doctor Who

Then the children played with geomags (Ben 10 ) while I researched aubergine ideas and learnt about adders on the internet. Ady has a big pile of big and small tomatoes, chilli peppers, sweet peppers and aubergines that he used as props on QVC at the weekend and as part of my Eat More Fruit and Vegetables March Continued I am trying new things so I thought I’d do something with some of it. I made roasted aubergine with roasted and skinned tomatoes and mozzarella and herbs from the garden (I say garden, what I actually mean is excess QVC stock :lol:). But I wasn’t impressed really. Ady is cooking tomorrow so the eggplants get another chance to delight me before being relegated back to ‘things I don’t eat’ again.

The children had dinner and then as Ady was at a meeting and we knew he’d be home late they got ready for bed and we read the huge pile of picture books we’d got which was nice. We’d got a particularly lovely retelling of the Tortoise and the Hare with gorgeous illustrations along with a couple of old favourites such as Six Dinner Sid and All Pigs Are Beautiful.

In other news the fiesty cockerel is continuing to give me things to ponder on. I am slightly scared of him as he appears to have taken against me and flies up at me all pecky and attitudey. Realistically I know he would do very little damage but he is loud and orange and pecky! 😆 He is fine with the children and all three seem utterly happy in the area of garden we have fenced off for them. They have had it for 2 weeks plus now and not seen the need to venture further. They are actually quite flappy rather than any good at flying so I suspect they just can’t be arsed to put the effort in to fly over the fence! Today there were 2 incidents of cats in there though – a ginger one this morning and a black one tonight. The cockerel goes mental and even the two hens puff up, make lots of noise and look menacing so I don’t think they are in too much danger. I do believe that although it puts them in a tiny bit of danger letting them free range is better than the risk free small run option though. We have 25 eggs in an incubator due to hatch Thursday / Friday though so it could all get very chickeny round here this week which I suspect will give me bigger things to consider than the fate of the cockerel who is bloody great at his job of looking after his girls, getting them laying very regularly and protecting them from danger but is slightly scary to me.