Joined: 23 Jan 2009 Posts: 8579 Location: Ayrshire, Scotland
Posted: Sat Nov 30, 19 6:25 pm Post subject:
Here it is officially the first day of Summer... although we have been having hot summer weather already...
Opawa Farmers market today in Christchurch, hopefully, where most of the stalls are selling organic produce, including the coffee cart.
We travel to Blenheim tomorrow so will take a food gift.
two sammisons, ms yungi sammison and her chap who she has not formally introduced as yet.
less sparrows but most eaters over the last few days are known ones,there were members of a second troop among the 30+ that turned up a week ago, there has been a noticeable lack of sparrow action for a couple of days.
numbers reduce in winter but that is gradual
i suspect the weekend "feed the birds" thing has gone "full winter"
ace if they are not here they have loads of food elsewhere for a few days
dik is pretty good at training me, fat walter two and hairy ankles are regulars, there is a new lady blackbird on the block who is not the same shape as the ballbird family of a few years ago.
other wildlife includes unseasonally frisky leopard slugs
Glad some Sammisons are back, even if not the original ones. Robins are quite good at training people, although the 'down the garden' robin and me do seem to interrupt each other a bit. I will be digging out a compost heap and spreading the compost, and it is in the place I want to work, even though I tell it where there is some nice fresh compost to inspect. I regret that we have so many pigeons here that they just get lumped as 'pigeons' and don't have names.
yungi and her bloke seem to have settled in, this aft they were quite happy to gather my offering while i was 6 feet away
it is a bit dark for snaps and a bit wet to spray paint the umbrellas ( poundland£3 vs posh ones, no contest ) but they did not worry if i made eye contact, moved harmlessly or did odd human stuff
improvised photo kit often saves cash but sometimes the thing you need is not a commercial product so you have to make it, reflectors are cheaper than chips if you make em.
the nice thing about a parabolic brolly rather than lamps is it isn't obvious the lighting has been boosted to the subject or the viewer
Reflectors are good. We once saw a respectable middle aged lady lying on the ground in the wood, and of course went to make sure she was all right. She had a collapsible reflector in one hand and a camera in the other, and was trying to get good light onto some toothwort at the base of a tree. No emergency luckily, but dedication to photography.
We have had wood mice crawl around very near us and seem to be completely oblivious to our presence, so wonder if they really see us if we keep still.
Only wildlife we saw yesterday was a robin wandering around the yard and a couple of buzzards. There seem to be a lot of them about here at the moment.
the sammisons live at a different pace to most of us, to see them we need to be slow , they are always fast and only notice us if we are trying to be fast.
love em to bits
it is nice there is a diaspora that can recolonize as required
PS they did notice accidental blue on blue near miss and worrying snappiness in a box but mostly they are ok with my appalling behaviour
derbyshiredowser
Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 980 Location: derbyshire
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 19 9:39 pm Post subject:
Weekend of wildlife here yesterday we had a very large adult Heron on the roof of the bottom of the garden peoples house. The heron was constantly being dive bombed by a crow trying to move it on. Then we discovered a large quantity of dog biscuits had disappeared from the boiler cupboard via a multi rat shaped holes in the bottom of the plasterboard where there was no skirting board. Rather annoying because its next doors rat problem that a council person is trying to solve unsuccessfully and we know where they are coming in. Anyhow at 10:30 last night you could hear the rat chomping at the plasterboard despite me puting a vast quantity of slate chippings in the holes and covering with quick setting mortar. Today we fill the cavities with expanding foam and slate to see what happens then I saw this and everything seemed OK
I can understand that. Rats are a total nuisance. Not sure about the snake, although it might solve the rat problem. It looks rather like a cobra though, and I don't think I would like to meet one of those.
wire wool and fixer foam is a very unpopular snack among the whiskery ones but you can remove it with an old breadknife if required
if you were feeling very mean you could use the visitation as a means of destruction and trap them for a few days before you block the holes for the next ones:twisted:
rats are wildlife if they stay wild but not when they are eating walls and unfortunately they are your rats if they are in bonzo's biscuits.
at a guess the council will seek, reduce housing/food, test bait and poison. that usually takes a few weeks to thin them out or remove them completely.
if heaps have been turned, nests disturbed etc healthy but displaced ones will be all over the place, those may try to move in, stop them.
apart from the damage they do to people and their stuff they are pretty rough on the other wildlife
if she did take that photo under her floor i would not be poking about to find the thing.
it looks like a recently fed(big mouse or small rat) Asian cobra of a decent size(maybe about 3 feet long and depending on species well big enough to be fatal with a minimum bite even a spit could blind you)
ummm , probably best to believe her until the photo is given the forensic due diligence as being under her floor and that not being a rubber one.
it passes for alive imho and based on the other snap it might be under her floor.
there is still a dark side to the exotic pet trade but it is tiny, any licenced facility would have dialled 999 and fessed up to offer to help find it as soon as the vivarium was empty.
if that sighting is real the snake was probably a "guard dog" in a Vietnamese run industrial sized grow room.
the serfs who work there are used to them and the local "taxman" is terrified of em