No-fly screen

It has never happened before, but this year we keep getting birds flying around in the house.  One got in while my parents were here, another got trapped in the three season room last week, and today two wrens came and flapped all around the downstairs until I opened a window and shooed them out.  Forgetting to close the sliding flyscreen at the back of the house obviously doesn't help, but I don't think we're being more careless than we ever used to be.  Anyway, today I just had time to note how different a bird looks when it's not in its natural environment.  Or maybe it's not the bird itself that looks different, but the way that you find yourself looking at it when it's perched on the back of a dining chair?

Meanwhile the kids got involved with a nature observation project of their own this afternoon.  Each had a friend over, and they spent a good chunk of their time together hanging out in a couple of muddy ponds that have formed on some land up the road.  The children discovered lots of tadpoles and froglets, and got busy with containers, moving tadpoles from the swamp most likely to dry up first to the deeper one across the road. 

They all ended up covered in mud, with their wellies full of pondwater.  Hooray!  You can't beat the summer holidays!