These are the creatures we have seen in the immediate vicinity (our garden or within a mile of the Donich) since we moved in back in October. Pine Marten Badger Fox Otter Red Deer Red Squirrel Short tailed vole Field mouse Bat Heron Buzzard Falcon Garden birds -Tits (great, coal, blue), Robin, Chaffinch, Blackbird, Thrush, […]
This has been a very exciting week for us on the Wildlife front. Not only did we get to meet one of the badgers, and see the encounter between cat and pine marten – but yesterday we saw two new arrivals. The first was when we were sitting in the dining room watching dusk fall […]
Last night I had just put the nuts out for the wildlife when I happened to look out of the window. There was one of our badgers munching away. Luckily R’s sister who is an excellent photographer (her photo included below) was here – so we very quietly went outside to see if we could […]
Since before we moved here I have been a bit worried about the cats and some of the wildlife we have here. Although I have joked a lot about Tora having a girlfriend he can’t bring home because she is a Pine Marten, I did have it at the back of my mind how awful […]
As suddenly as they appeared – in one day all the frogs have departed. Where last week there was a writhing mass of slimy bodies ‘revelling in the joys of fornication’ now there is only a great mass of frogspawn. Let’s hope we get a decent crop of froglets which will eat some of the […]
Last night I asked R to go and put some food out for our night time visitors while I made some coffee. More fool me because he was the lucky one – going round the corner of the house towards the shed, he heard a snuffling sound. Standing very still, a badger came right up […]
We now have a seriously large number of frogs coming out of hibernation and making the most of the spring (to put it politely). There is frog spawn in large quantities in the ditches, and every time I walk past our pool I can see the ripples as they swim for cover (don’t blame them […]
Today we had another major thrill. Our second webcam (after the success of ‘shedcam’) is ‘pondcam’ and this is where anyone following the blog will have seen the video of our heron. But I was never expecting to see the pictures we got from it this morning. About 4am a long sinuous creature swam rapidly […]
This morning – instead of the queue of small birds and squirrels waiting for their nuts – everything was eerily silent, with not a single small creature to be seen or heard. Then we saw the reason – there was a beautiful peregrine falcon sitting beside the feeder. It immediately flew off when it saw […]
I am not a big social media user – but whenever I complain about things like (for example) having problems syncing photos between all three of my tablets – R always calls it a #firstworldproblem. So I have a new category of this which I will call #ruralscotlandproblem. Rural Scotland doesn’t really sum it up – […]
