A summer's evening walk by the canal and bedtime reading.

After not blogging for over a week, you get two in one day!  While it's great that summer has finally arrived, after months of seemingly endless rain, it's actually rather too hot for me and my equally pale and interesting girls!  But come about 7 o'clock, it's just perfect for an evening stroll.  So we took Uncle M on a very similar one to the one we went on with Granny nearly 2 months ago.  Unlike last time we did see the swans with their cygnets, which are getting rather big now.

We also saw some young coots, which may well be those that we saw as little chicks last time.

There were a few little chicks too, which we thought were probably a second brood and we also spotted a coot on a nest.

And we saw some young birds in a nest calling for mum!

Other than birds we saw plenty more wildlife.  I was fairly confident that this is a tiger moth caterpillar, but on doing a search to check, there are dozens of 'woolly bear' caterpillars and not until page 4 was there one that looked like this one.

Some lilac with lots of bumble bees on.

And a particularly fascinating ants' nest!  K & M said that it was being 'attacked by flies' but on closer inspection it turned out that the 'flies' were in fact flying ants.  Something to follow up, I feel.

Finally in terms of fauna, we found a dead rat on the footpath by the canal.  K quickly walked on with Uncle M, but M and I had a bit of a closer look and talked about how you could see the teeth poking out were similar to other rodents' teeth that she'd found when dissecting owl pellets.

We also had a bit of a look at the flora and found this pretty flower, which I will be attempting to identify (any help gratefully received!).

When we got home and K & M went to bed.  M decided that she wanted to read The Secret Garden, having recently re-watched the TV series on dvd.  She read about a chapter and a half before deciding that she was too tired to continue.  I was quite surprised at her choice, because she generally choses books with bigger text, shorter chapters and at least a few pictures.  She did really well though and just asked what a few words said: Memsahib, desolation, cholera and crêpe (the material).  Not bad for a just turned 7 year old!