Our birches ...

..... at the top of the drive have gone, Eden Tree Care took them down yesterday, Friday, early morning, it took them less than half an hour.  They had grown so tall and wide that we thought they must be a problem for our neighbours.
Little did I think how well they would do when I planted them as spindly little twigs in 1998/9, the only thing growing along that side of our drive at the time had been a fern, the remnant of which you can see behind the middle birch in this photo:

 
I can't find many pictures to show how tall they had grown, but the 2 photos on the right below show how bare it is now at the top of our drive.

 

Now I wonder if those big mushrooms we saw for the first time this year will show they faces again now that the birches have gone?

                                        

(Frances, did you see this in Wiki?

Leccinum scabrum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The birch bolete (Leccinum scabrum) is an edible mushroom in the family Boletaceae, 

and was formerly classified as Boletus scaber. The birch bolete is widespread in Europe, 

as well as elsewhere, in the Northern Hemisphere, occurring only in mycorrhizal association 

with birchtrees. It fruits from June to October; its common names include rough-stemmed bolete, 

scaber stalk, and birch bolete.^[1][2])

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I'm sorry, the only duck pictures I've taken in the last few days were these two of Dotty, from a distance:

 

And these two photos show John's work from yesterday, he was making a sound roof for the wood store: