Pig Sty Avenue

I had a couple of hours in the garden in the early evening, (it's already getting too hot to do very much during the day, my patch of ground facing south west as it does). I raked over the garlic bed I'd cleared a few days ago. There's an ants' nest at one end of it: big buggers unlike anything we get in the UK. Anyway, I hope they'll leave the garlic alone. I planted just one row down the middle of the bed, the cloves about 10" apart, and planted so that only the sprouting green shoot was above ground. Then I planted "Russian Giant" sunflower seeds, that I'd bought back home, in two small beds, each about 2x4 ft. One of them I planted as per the instructions: each sowing a pair of seeds, and they were about 18" apart. This bed is under the kitchen window, and I'm looking ahead to a time when birds might be attracted to the seeds, and the flowers should be at a level with the window. The other bed I was deliberately more slapdash...

Apart from our friend the scops owl , every night I hear what I'm guessing are Egyptian Nightjars . I'm guessing because my bird ID book is imprecise on the call, and I can't find any sound files of the call on the web to confirm the ID. If I managed to see one that would be great. A photo would be astonishing. But I will try to get an mp3. There's very little about this bird on the web. Googling the latin gives us 55,700 hits, true, but most of them are brief mentions. So I can tell you that it's call is very loud, pew, pew, pew . I get the impression there are two or three calling simultaneously. It's never heard outsided the hours of darkness. It's sometimes very loud indeed, as if the birds were just a few feet from the houses. The call seems to be made in flight.