I moved into my house 14 months ago but, as the first 12 months were taken up with renovations, this year is the first opportunity I’ve had to spend lots of time in the garden. The privacy and view from the back of the bungalow is the main reason I bought it (well, that and the tranquillity and the room I can use as a photography space) and I’m already amazed by the abundance of wildlife.

The weather has been amazing in recent weeks and I’ve pottered about the garden doing various jobs, interspersed with lots of swaying gently to and fro in my swing seat and drinking in the scenery. Finches fighting over the seed feeder, orange tip butterflies in search of early nectar, delicate pink blossom gently falling from my apple tree, fat buzzing bees, the resident Woodpeckers arriving for their daily meal (he likes the seeds while she prefers nuts) and an annoyingly chirpy Cricket. Robins, Sparrows, Dunnocks, Wrens, Goldfinches, Great Tits, Blackbirds, Swallows and a Collared Dove are all daily visitors,with both Curlews and Lapwings calling from the meadow behind. The space is pregnant with life.

I was resting the other day having a drink when I noticed a pair of Swallows sitting on the power cable between my house and my shed. The male was making repeated advances towards the female, who was clearly having none of it and pecked him viciously on more than one occasion! In the end he admitted defeat and left her to it 😂 To be able to get a shot like this while simply sitting in my garden and not even trying makes me feel so blessed.

My resident Blue Tits have had a more successful courtship and have set up home deep inside an old water pump. They are currently both busy feeding chicks, whose chirps gets louder each day 🙂. They used the pump last year and I couldn’t work out how the fledglings were going to leave the nest but I needn’t have worried – they plopped out of the spout in production line fashion, closely monitored by Mum and Dad!

I have patio doors from my bedroom onto the garden and lie in bed each evening watching the sun set over the distant Lakeland fells. The scene is different each and every day and as the inky blackness of night arrives and the stars in our galaxy appear I feel both miniscule and enormous. It never ceases to make me feel awestruck.

It is a wildlife photographer’s dream and I still pinch myself that I live here. How on earth did I get to be so lucky?