I’ve been thoroughly enjoying watching them fly around us and very close to us on the terrasse. The last few nights they’ve emerged around 10:35 pm and played “Red Arrows” together for around 10 minutes. Wonderful to watch…
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We have two squirrels at the moment.
One regularly opens the nut box, takes a nut, then shims up the tree to eat it.
The other is smaller, not sure what to do about the box, and regularly sits on the lid. He loses his footing but generally manages to cling on to something with those claws. He’ll learn eventually !
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I had one as small as that but it grew to twice the size as shown here…this is half of its eventual size. Not sure what they were but they didn’t bother me…
This is going to sound ridiculous. I found a rat trapped in a kitten trap - bigger than a rat trap – in my kitchen yesterday morning. One with a vertical sliding door at each end, and which the 2 rats in my kitchen always ignored, until yesterday – a teenage rat had been trapped.
I covered the trap and went straight to the car to release the rat a kilometre away. However, it seems that when I placed the trap in the car, an appendage on one of the vertical sliding doors of the trap got caught on the car seat and lifted the door sufficiently for the rat to escape into the car. I didn’t know this until I opened the trap door to release the rat into long grass and saw there was no rat in the trap!
To check if the rat was indeed in the car, I left a little pile of cat biscuit in the boot overnight. It was gone this morning - eaten! There is now a rat trap in the boot of my car.
On top of that I found the other rat, an adult, in the kitten trap in the kitchen this morning.
At least my kitchen rats are no longer rifling the kitchen. I’m pretty sure a very hungry rat in my car will be away into long grass tomorrow, along with his mum!
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We’ve talked about golden orioles on SF, and possibly even in this thread, so finally, for you delight and delectation, I give you, some low light, dusk (and thus a bit grainy) shots of some recent golden oriole visitors to the garden. All in all, a group of about 8 individuals came over on 2 occasions to sit for a while in the dead birch, and hide in the leaves of the acers nearer the house. Unfortunately, the bright yellow and black adult males kept well out of sight, so the photos only show either females or possibly juvenile males, but their markings are still pretty distinctive. You might need to zoom in for a closer look.
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Also, spotted, this time just as we left the house to go to work, this resident fox, which we have seen a number of times, but which usually scarpers as soon as it hears me approaching. On this particular morning, it definitely seemed more absorbed in finding food than worrying about me clicking away with my camera.
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I think I may have caught and released my last rat. An adult female, I think. She wasn’t frightened of me and seemed almost tame. May have been here a long time and has gotten used to me. She didn’t bolt when I released her but came out of the trap cautiously and burrowed into the long grass and disappeared. Still got mice around though but only those that catch the corner of my eye.
Rodent infestation over I hope, but what will happen when the coming autumn and winter looms….!?
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Dirty windscreen so not a good picture but I was surprised to see a fox just standing by the roadside yesterday afternoon with something in its mouth. It stood there not moving as if waiting for cars to pass by so it could cross to the other side.
And this was at 3 pm! A sick fox maybe.
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Hopefully, just a clever one.
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I have yet to see ‘splooting’ in the wild
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I have seen some of ours do that the last couple of years when we got towards 40C, though we have quite a large population with the woods around us.
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When visiting a friend on my way north in England the other day I related a visit to another some years ago and the air rifle he kept to shoot grey squirrels with.
‘Like that one you mean?’ he said and I noticed what looked to my untrained eye I like an assault rifle complete with telescopic sights.
Then he pointed to the dead squirrel in the garden. He hates them because ‘they do damage in the loft’ and it is there to attract the red kites which he loves and which were circling overhead.
I said nowt though I do not approve, and also thought later, what about the lead pellets these lovely birds might consume? 
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We’ve got these little chaps Pipistrelle (and a larger version) dozing behind our shutters during the day…
This one wandered indoors for some reason… thankfully the larger version stays outside 
photo shows my toecaps, so you can judge the size of the little 'un.
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Peacock turned up in the school grounds and stayed for a few days. No ring on it so perhaps wild? RSPCA etc not interested.
Izzy x
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I had lunch with a friend and when I went out to my car next door’s peacock had pooed all over the door handle.
Peacock poos are huge and messy!
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Peafowl are pretty awful when it comes to behaviour, my grandparents had some and they liked getting up on cars and scratching them, beating their reflections up in the hubcaps and screeching and that was it really. Beautiful though!
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