Wildlife friends

Enlarge this photo and see if you can spot what this is? It is very dark outside so you will have to look closely to see it.

Yes, we have a nightly visitor...Mrs. Tiggy~Winkle, if you please'm. And I did not even loose my pocket~handkins. Do you know this delightful tale from Beatrix Potter?


She visited us at Cranberry Cottage the weekend before also but had a baby with her. We have now realized that she is coming into the garden each night and chewing away at the bark of the tree branches we use to line the planted areas of our garden. They are looking rather worse for the wear now but it is fun to see her come into the garden. I am not too sure she enjoyed us snapping the photos though.


On Saturday, we went to the campsite where my friend and her husband were staying. This is their third year to spend their summer vacation up north near our cottage. They asked if we would like to go out to eat for dinner and we said fine. While Sonja and I went for a quick run to a shop we love, the men stayed behind to talk.
She asked me if I would rather go have Dutch pancakes as we first talked about or perhaps go to a place where Jos and I had talked about going many times before. They have now eaten there a number of times and really like it. I said to let the men decide. They both picked the restaurant instead of pancakes. So off we went.

In the north of Holland, there are a number of storks who stay for the spring and summer to nest. One of the nests is on top of this restaurant. Can you see it? There were three birds in the nest as we left and one sitting on a lamppost just outside the restaurant. It is great to sit on the terrace eating dinner and hear them outside. Have you ever heard the clicking noise a stork makes when it communicates with another stork? I wonder if they are thinking why don't we share our dinner?


At one point, Sonja told me a feather fell to the ground as one stork returned to the nest and she went out to the field and got it for me. She returned with two feathers to add to my collection. I gather them as I find them in our garden at the cottage and place them in a little glass vase. Here they are sitting in my tray on our table.


At the end of a wonderful evening spent together with our friends, they were wispering among each other. They had planned all along to treat us to dinner that night. Had we known that, we would have choosen pancakes as this was too much. Thank you so very much Mike and Sonja. We enjoyed our evening for the wonderful meal but especially for the warm company you both are!