So yeah.
A totally crazy end to a crazy week. Seeing the Least Bittern with literally minutes to spare just about sums up our Shetland. We saw everything we went to see. I hear there were some just minutes behind us that didn’t get to see it. Incredible, a different mega every day we were there.
In the two visits we’ve been to Shetland, ten days total, we’ve seen:
LANCEY
Eastern yellow wag
Semi P
Ortolan (pah!)
Western Bonellis
YELLOW RUMPED WARBLER
Rustic Bunt
Sibe stonechat
Woodchat
PECHORA PIPIT
Bluethroat (found)
Rosefinch
Arctic Redpoll
2 White Billed Diver
3 king eider
Ring-neck Duck
LEAST BITTERN
Quite incredible.
And obviously the padders, Yellow Brows, Great Northerns, Slav Grebe, Bonxies etc.
Yellow Brows don’t even warrant a mention up there really. I think we found 13 ourselves but that’s just the norm. But whilst thinking about Yellow Brows earlier today, I started doing Roobs some soup and cheese-and-crackers. I had to go back and hyphenate that as it read like “some soup and cheese and crackers” which is different to “some soup and cheese-and-crackers” do you know what I mean? The cheese was now in a square shape not the usual rectangle-style (hyphen) mature cheddar!? Had the cheese companies changed it to suit a standard cracker I wondered? We don’t have to patch it in to cover the cracker? But then I realised I’d not been to sleep and was still out of my tiny mind on uppers and downers.
I still needed to find out.
So I prepared to try out my theory and placed said square cheese on BUTTERED cracker, I don’t even get cheap margarine for the kids anymore oh no sir. (ha). See the initial results below:
No way. I’m not having that! What are these cheese manufacturers up to? It’s almost as if they make the cheese in such a shape and size as to reduce production costs to the optimum!? So I came to the conclusion after passing out stood up for an unknown length of time that the cheese did NOT offer enough coverage of cracker area. It was clear that smaller slices were needed to patch in.
The results were fine Roobs said. But to achieve optimum coverage the effort required and the stages actioned were the same as a traditional rectangular-shaped (hyphen) milk-based (hyphen) savoury foodstuff.
Three “slices” came from one large “slice”. I’d made Roobs four crackers, therefore, economically, the optimum number of crackers is in multiples of three. Four, as today, shows a wastage of two thirds of a slice or offer the disgraceful behaviour of leaving one cracker short.
See slice diagram above. I simply threw the wastage on the floor and the new dog ate it. At this point I realised yet again that I was still off my fucking head and had been making cheese-and-crackers (yep) and photographing the stages to add to a bird blog for no one to read for the last four-and-a-half (sigh) hours.
Thanks to Leo for the vital household tips in these difficult economic times
………..
