A Hawthorne in the Side - GC1R6HK

A belated Happy New Year to one and all - this is my first post in 2010 due to the pressure of work, Christmas, work, snow and work. Did I mention WORK?

Today I went bird-watching at Pennington Flash where I've recently discovered the feeding station at the 'Bunting Hide'. If you've never been there I can thoroughly recommend it as you can see so many species of birds close up, including the Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Bramblings, Long Tailed Tits, Reed Buntings, Bullfinches and Willow Tits as well as all the more common garden birds such as Robins, Blue Tits, Great Tits, Blackbirds and Thrushes. I took loads of birdy photos, some of which are really pleasing, like the one shown above.

As I was in the area I decided to have a second go at this cache, which I failed to find sometime last year. After looking around GZ for a good ten minutes, I nearly gave up for a second time - I hate bramble! I think I read a little too much into the previous logs about 'widening the search' and not getting too 'hung up' on the hawthorne tree, as I had started to look for suitable hollows quite a long way from GZ. Just before I was going to leave disappointed, I decided to have another look under the branches of the hawthorne tree and hey presto, there it was. The camouflage bag was doing excellent work because it was hardly covered at all and yet was still very difficult to spot.

I grabbed the bag and took it into some open space to sign the log. As previously noted in the logs, the geocoin is missing and the box is broken - unfortunately this has caused it to let in water and the contents are wet with some things going rusty. The log book, although wet, could be signed however, so I did this and took a dinosaur for my growing collection of such beasts.

Then I returned the cache to exactly where I'd found it and covered as best I could with some leaves and twigs. It's still quite exposed and perhaps should be moved to another hiding place. It really could do with some TLC.