Pine Marten Central

Jun 13th, 2019

Pine Marten Central

The night before last I unfortunately scared off a huge pine marten when refilling the seeds for the birds.
This morning, the baby marten was back on the bird table. I stood and watched it for about ten minutes and it was stuffing the nuts down as quick as it could. They must have been a better food source than the siskins as they stayed on the seeds the whole time, and neither predator nor prey seemed very bothered by each other.

So we do seem to have our Pine Martens back – I had been bothered for a while that they had left the area. We also still have the badgers (ate a couple of pieces of chicken last night), the foxes, and obviously the deer which are constantly in the garden. The only thing we haven’t seen in a longish time is the otter, but this could well be because the pond cam is unusable and had to be switched off because it is activated by insects and rain, so as you can imagine it was getting switched on to record pretty constantly.

Our clematis is getting better and better as June goes on. It now has about 20 flowers on it. Plenty of wild flowers down by the pool as well, and surprisingly few midgies.

Our other wild creature is sleeping peacefully by the window. He has had two mice this week, one of which he ate and the other which I rescued. It is strange because when his brother was alive he never seemed to catch anything. I wonder if some of the catches were brought in by him and then just appropriated by Schrodi. Also strangely, after 16 years of living with him, Tora has not looked for Schrodi once since he died. We think he likes being an only cat – sad but true.