Okay, well, I’ve always loved to go to India and the Amazon would be interesting. But luckily, they’ve come to me because not only are we people now outnumbered by parakeets, we have our own resident little Terrapin in the cut! They actually have colonised some parts of the network and there are reeds further up, so I’m sure it’ll be okay.
Another nice surprise was too hedgies in the conservatory, unfortunately I missed out on seeing them but was told that they were running around and the one bolted underneath the sofa that the sparrowhawk had perched on a few years earlier. After gobbling up a dish of cat biscuits and water they scurried off elsewhere.
last sighting – the biggest, baddest piece of bright yellow chicken of the woods fungus on the chestnut tree at the bottom of the garden
They certainly were well fed. Let’s just say I work in retail and they got quailty stuff that was out of date that you wouldn’t believe! Sadly they stopped coming about 18 months ago, not sure if they moved on or were traffic victims.
@WillC beautiful pictures. Where we used to live there were a family of foxes living in a copse at the back of our garden and we would see them lying out in the sun with their cubs playing around them. I used to feed them every evening. I feed just about everything that comes to our garden, nothing goes to waste in our house even leftover cat food goes to the hedgehogs along with some cat biscuits.
Same here, often drop stuff over the park a couple of streets away for the foxes. Recently it was dry dog food our dog didn’t like! Or at Christmas it’s the remains of the Turkey, obviously no bones.
Hey well something funny happened yesterday and I had to give it a mention here!! I was sitting in the conservatory on my favourite (slightly trashed by the rescue cats but very comfy) sofa having morning coffee, trying to make the most of five minutes of peace and quiet, not easy here but… Anyway…
Suddenly I started hearing some scuffling noises and just ignored it. Thought it was my ears playing tricks on me. And then, it started again! With some digging, and I thought where the hell is that noise coming from!? It’s sort of sounded like it was from the back of the sofa.
The one cat did hide in the sofa the one time and as he was nowhere to be seen and as it was cold for the first time in ages with the first bit of rain, I thought it somehow managed to get in there again and ignored it.
But then it started up again this time, with munching noises, like the munching my dear departed giant angora rabbit used to make when she was tucking into her Timothy hay.
And so I was getting really worried now because I thought whatever is in the chair is eating it alive and plastic and animals aren’t a good combination! So I moved the sofa with my leg and then found some poops that looking conspicuously like hedgehog poops! uh oh the dots started to join in my mind…
So I called in the backup and 10 minutes later, with the sofa on its side out shoots a giant Mrs Tiggywinkle!!
It was a race to try and contain the speeding hedgehog trying to get her hardest to get back into the sofa again, but luckily she was caught and re-homed in the wilderness next door where there is a good supply of meaty slugs and now a barrier has been put to stop her coming back in.
It’s not every day that I get the honour to be drinking coffee on a nice comfortable sofa with a digging and munching hedgehog in the chair to keep me entertained, she joins the long list of other animals to colonise the chair, including a sparrowhawk, cat and a wasps nest and of course myself!
Today my 18 year old cat brought a live mouse indoors and p!onked it on the rug in front of me. It shot off under the sideboard and then dived under the fridge freezer. Hubby moved it and I managed to get the mouse in a plastic jug and took it outside and release it in the garden. We seem to have a lot of mice in our garden at the moment.
We had a neighbour’s cat in our garden playing with a mouse that had gone into play dead mode. Managed to get it and put it in an old ice cream tub and it soon revived, so released it up the street in a bit of wasteland. Next morning there was a mouse head and spinal cord on the mat outside the kitchen door!
My cat never eats anything she has caught. I occasionally find a dead mouse in the garden but there is never a mark on it I think she whops them with her paw and they are done for. But I do try and rescue them from her, if I tell her to drop it she normally does.
When cats know there’s a mouse about they turn into absolute demons. They’re absolutely savage! Especially female tabby cats, our girl when she knows theres a mouse hole about she’ll be camped at it constantly, spending hours just staring at it. It’s savage but when you look at how fast mice breed unfortunately they need a predator like that to keep them in check. If you have any doubts about that, look at videos of mouse infestations in Australia! It has to be seen to be believed
I’d keep an eye on that. We had a mouse infestation about two years ago and it was an absolute nightmare. They get in everything, they even eat the house alive and they breed like rats. Or probably worse than rats! I thought mice were extremely cute and harmless before not but not now. If any of the cats start playing with a mouse, I just turn away and let them deal with it. It’s horrible but it’s nature I guess. Plus it’s really good for the cats to eat mice, they get a lot of nutrients from the organs that they don’t get in cat food.
i’m pretty sure our infestation started with our neighbour having chickens, cause they give the chickens the grain and it attracts the mice and they didn’t have any cats to deal with it. The reason why cats have been so popular for so many centuries, pharaoh love them for keeping the mices down and guarding the grain!
They all live down the bottom of the garden, which is quite big and they dont come in the house of their own accord as we have three cats who spend most of their time in the conservatory so a mouse would have to run the gauntlet to get in. But my little missy is an avid mouser.
Oh wow so you’ve got several cats as well! Ours are all rescue cats, two of them were our uncles that we took on when he died and he himself had them as rescue cats when they were kittens. And then our other cat is the tabby girl, she’s a prolific mouser but she doesn’t get on with the other cats so they live in the conservatory, how they lived with the hedgehog in there I have absolutely no idea. But they were all camping out in the conservatory and our girl, she has custody of the house. She’s my favourite and I’ll try and post a picture on here so you can check her out
Can you link it please? Looking at some other pictures now, it’s quite addictive looking through people’s pictures! But there’s a lot to look through so if you can link it X
It’s funny to watch the cats do their bum wiggle dance of excitement as they watch the birds on the feeders. What’s not funny is when they leap and crash into the window
uh oh the dots started to join in my mind…
and now a barrier has been put to stop her coming back in.
