Oct 7th, 2016

Author: donich_admin

A Good Night for Wildlife

We’ve been missing seeing our resident badgers over the summer – they have been visiting – but for some reason only in the small hours of the morning. All of a sudden now autumn is here they are back at 9pm. R had the bright idea of moving our light pole into the kitchen – the light doesn’t seem to bother them but means we can see them really clearly. Last night there were two… I’ve only ever seen two at one time, so I don’t know how many there actually are in the sett – I suspect at least four from the number of visits we have some nights.

Anyway – yesterday started when we opened our door at 7:15am to see the young stag who has been visiting us with his mother since he was a fawn standing in the drive not five meters from us. He was off sharpish and I don’t think we will be seeing much more of him as he has been supplanted by a new young one, and will soon be up on the hills getting ready to collect himself a harem. To continue the deer theme – we went on for our walk and heard a stag roaring up on Beinn Donich for the first time this year. Then Mum and this year’s fawn were on the lawn all afternoon – I think they more or less live in the wild part of our ‘garden’ down near the river.

We have a new heron on the pond – I think it is a youngish one because it is significantly smaller than the one we used to see and is also very skittish.

Then to complete the wildlife theme, Schrodi had no less than three rodents during the night – one dead short tailed vole, one dead field mouse, and an unidentified one (as R puts it “a wee brown thing”) which was released unharmed. Apparently cats on average only bring 50% of the things they kill into the house – so if that is true he had six during one night.