Hi Dolce,
Crocuses (croci?) generally have distinctive orange stamen/carpel arrangement, like an orange tower in the middle of the flower - native irish ones flower in early spring/late winter. Autumn crocus is not an irish species (in fact its not a crocuses at all!) and have seperated loose stamens more yellow than orange.
Your camera may have a "macro" function on it, which is for closeups...
Hi
Yellow eye means sparrowhawk.
Paul
Hi Dolce. Your identification skills are getting closer to the mark.:t: I am not sure which book you are using, but one with distribution maps helps narrow your options down considerably. Obviously birds do occur outside their normal range, but if your book covers the whole of Europe there could be 500 birds species in it. For the beginner this makes the task seem very daunting. However you would be very lucky to encounter 100 species from your back garden. Take into account time of year and you could probably reduce this figure by another say 30% at any given time. This (and habitat etc) will narrow your options down so much that a correct id becomes so much easier.My daughter photographed this bird of prey on her new lawn having just caught and digested some unfortunate small bird, still unidentified. Andy has to go out when he comes home from work and pick up remains of the poor bird she says. I think it might be a Goshawk but not sure really.
It is of course totally illegal to interfere with any songbird in the EU but French President Mitterand was a fan: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5223077
A few holiday photos from Spain....the 2 vultures are ruppells.
A few more snaps trying to show how many stamens there are in this purple flower, the length of stalk and total absence of leaves. I am not certain if it is Meadow Safron or Naked Lady but the total absence of leaves makes me query the Nudifloras or Naked Lady flower.
Looks like three stamens so a true crocus of some kind is my guess...
Kieran Campbell had 13 Brent Geese on Saturday 13th Sept and 192 on 2nd October at Laytown, Co. Meath. Would love to be out myself but not possible at the moment.