Hi Nic
Yes, yes, yes- a hog in my garden at last!!! Found some poo yesterday so set up the camera & the feeding box with dry cat food & hog food mixed & this morning all the hog food was gone & most of the cat stuff & a few pictures of a young hog (probably last year’s I think) passing the camera & walking off on long long legs. It must be one of the teleporting hogs as there were no picture of how it got where it was or of it going in or out of the box. The camera will be differently place tonight to see what happens. It was 10 to 1 when he/she appeared on the camera. So excited, this is like Christmas!!
Your hovering light sounds like something we had once on a photo years ago, never got to the bottom of that. Had a huge crab like luminous looking monster on the other camera outside last year & after watching it coming & going for ages I finally realised it was a spider spinning a web across the camera.
Scrunched up wire netting is a plan, have to get window cleaner to do it for me as too high for my ladders. I liked having the sparrows to stay so it’ll be nice to have them again.
Am looking after next door’s cat as he more or less abandoned her when he started working away from home mid summer. Having spoken to him I now know he made a loose arrangement for dry food to be left down for her but there seems to have been no welfare included in that or water come to that. Have made her a little bed as she’s chosen to sleep in our open porch on top of one of Frankie’s old houses with a flat top. She has hardly got out of it since I made it two nights ago, think it’s a success. He’ll be home at the end of September so will have a confused cat who doesn’t know where she lives by that time. She eats by my front door & uses Frankie’s outdoor water bowl & the bird water.
Has Digger been about lately or is she still being mysterious? I often wonder if wildlife takes the same notice of things as we do re the noisy birds around the hog in the box, it might be a perception thing if it doesn’t represent danger they block it out. Re the bird with one leg it was probably born that way & doesn’t know any different. Have any of the hoglets been around?
Have never seen so many white butterflies as this year, constant supply. Saw a tiny blue one one day in my garden. The bee tubes are amazingly full, the four boxes all being used & in great numbers which is promising for next year. Evening Primrose here has seeded itself absolutely everywhere, am having to pull lots up as it’s in very awkward places but leaving lots to get on with it. The plants have been reflowering this weekend after they appeared to have finished, the plants I’ve left in previous years to die off & provide seed for the birds have formed dry architectural interest for the winter, perches for the birds & only finally fell over when the summer was so dry. Think if I didn’t pull up lots of the seedling the entire garden would be covered! My neighbour is the happy recipient of plants that have grown from blown seed, she also has a side border full of escapees of all the other plants I have!
Definitely must do something about water butts, Monty Don horrified me with open cattle troughs as water collectors as cats & other mammals drown regularly in deep open containers with no way to climb out. Water butts with badly fitting or missing tops have been responsible for some horrible accidents too. I never leave watering cans upright anywhere in the garden between uses since finding a drowned frog in Mum’s about 20 years ago for the same reason. Upright empty large flower pots are equally dangerous, found a frog who’d died because of not being able to climb back out of one many years back, it’s easy to not see the dangers of everyday things when you’re as big as we are in comparison to our little friends. My pots lie on their sides if not in use or safely away in a covered container.
The cooler weather is so much kinder isn’t it, the garden is well watered too as I’m sure yours is.
A rose I grew from a cutting has a glorious red flower on it, think I mentioned before it dates back to the 60’s when my Grandad grew it for Grandma when she was ill. Mum took cuttings & had two enormous plants & I took mine from hers when I emptied my parents’s bungalow in 2016 to sell it.
Look forward to your news!
