Hi Nic
Poor Digger, sounds like hard work being the only female with all those cheeky youths. Hope she puts them all in their place so she can get the food every night, much as I realise all of them need to play their part in continuing the hog population somehow.
Have just ordered Pam Ayres book from BHPS, thanks for telling me. Also a few other items, what a nice shop.
I emailed the developers of one of the sites up the road & asked specifically about hedgehog holes, bird nesting bricks & bat bricks being built into houses, also ponds & wildlife areas & am waiting to hear from them. It’s the ideal time to do all those things so wildlife have a chance to thrive from day one, particularly as they’re destroying a huge piece of countryside.
We have a new visitor, Tatty blackbird! Looking at him more closely it looks as if his baby feathers haven’t actually fallen out when the adult ones emerged & are sticking out all over the place. Thought at first he’d been attacked by something but not so sure now, the feathers look very fluffy sticking up, down & all ways. He comes & fills his beak with as much as he can & flies off, obviously has a nest nearby. How lovely about your robin, Grandad used to be a gardener & robins used to sit on the handle of his shovel. My aunt had one that came into her kitchen every day looking for scraps. Blackbirds serenading in the evenings here, the other assorted birdsong all day is wonderful to hear, some sing all night because of the streetlights on the main road but not the blackbirds, they seem to have the sense to go to bed.
Yes, it was a few years ago the hog rescue, probably before it was recognised as a problem but has always stuck in my mind as a hog food til seeing your advice on here & the biggest reason I used to put them out with cat food.
Doggy pal is very slightly improved again, hoping for further progress.
It makes me mad when people still use slug pellets, talking to a lady the other day & she quite happily told me she used them because slugs were eating her plants in the same breath as saying she’d love to have hedgehogs & how much she loved wildlife & cats! I said I don’t use any chemicals at all in my garden because of the risk to all those creatures & just grow something else if slugs eat things, she just smiled & said she thought it would be OK to keep using them, she’d not seen any poisoned animals….. Just as selfish as the people marking hogs, they do things regardless of the cost to the animals because it suits them.
My camera recorded just one jackdaw early this morning when I put it out last night, triggered a few times but whoever it was disappeared too quickly to be seen. Nobody ate any of the hog food, but putting it out & water every night just in case & setting the camera again as surely someone will come soon.
