Spring has Sprung

The lambs are bleating on the hill, the bees are buzzing on the crocuses and at last the frogs have started croaking in the ponds..oh and the sun is still shining..hooray spring has sprung :-)

I love this time of year as it fills me with feelings of anticipation and this year more so than usual as we have the new area of SSSI land to watch over as it starts to unfold its previously hidden flora and fauna. Every time we check the ponies now we notice new shoots sprouting up. The ponies have done and are still doing an excellent job of eating the unwanted rough grass and scrub. It has been a hard winter for them but as you can see from this photo of Tivy looking the picture of health, they have come through it very well.

Sadly the sheep have now been moved so we will not be stock checking them until they are returned again, probably in the late summer. I will miss my tickle sessions with Rambo but it's another place where it will be interesting to see which wild flowers appear. I am dreading the day when they move the ponies as I will miss them so much. I keep thinking about getting a pony/horse of my own but I am not sure I can really afford it.

I have now put the fleece that I collected from the sheep's field around the garden for the birds to use for their nests but so far I haven't seen any takers. It is perhaps still a bit early. Friendly robin and partner have now been joined by a blackbird who is also getting quite friendly and is usually waiting with the robins in the Elderberry for me to restock the bird table in the morning.

Luckily my cat, Lizzy, at 19 years old, is past the age of wanting to catch birds and is just happy to sit in the sun watching them flutter around. It is strange how the birds seem to know that she is not a threat to them anymore. I have seen the same in Namibia where springbok will sometimes happily graze really close to resting lions and it is this body language that Monty Roberts (horse whisperer) uses when working with horses.

Badger or Fox?

This evening the garden and valley have been very still, no wind and no wildlife. Evenings like this tend to leave me feeling a bit flat, although, tonight, the absence of wildlife was probably down to me.

Around 6.30pm I had suddenly realised my cat Lizzy was missing. She is 18 yrs old with a thyroid problem and never ventures far from the bungalow these days. The furthest she has been for many months is the veg. patch, so I was very worried. My family and I all separately checked the garage and shed as both had been opened when my husband had mown the lawn earlier. Then we searched the whole garden, front and back, and then the field right up to the woods, calling her name all the time. After about an hour of this I thought I would check the garage again and thankfully there she was waiting at the door to be let out. I was sooo relieved, however, I am guessing that all the calling has put the wind up the creatures that usually venture our way.

I had hoped to see the foxes because I was keen to know if they were responsible for a fairly large deep hole that had been dug in the middle of the lawn and which had a scent mark dropping in it. Later on when I went to fill it in I discovered that it was actually the entrance to a bumble bees nest which either a fox or badger had been trying to get at (needless to say I didn't fill in the hole).

The badgers tend to visit the garden later at night and since our security light has broken it is usually too dark to see them (must get round to buying a new one). There is a strain of albino badger around this part of Biggin Hill and for several years we had one visiting the garden.

Even though I can't see the badgers at the moment I always know when they have visited the garden because of the numorous holes they leave behind but I have never noticed droppings in them before so I am thinking that it was the fox that was after the bumbles.

Dawn and Dusk

I love the early mornings. I don't like the getting up but once I am out of bed I always feel a flutter of excitement as I draw back the living room curtains to see what's going on in the valley. It is a bit like unwrapping a present, you are never sure what will be in it but it is usually something good. Dawn and dusk are good times to see wildlife as it is quiet and the animals are usually a bit braver and hugry. This morning there was a young dog fox snuffling for mice in the field which, as he was only a few feet away from my friendly pheasant, was a bit worrying but they seemed to have an understanding as both ignored the other.

I don't wake up easily for these dawn experiences but this is where one of our most important residents comes in useful and that is my cat Lizzy. She is 18 years old and has been with us, from a kitten, for nearly half our married life and most of the children's lives. She has no tail due to an argument with a car when she was two and she has a bald patch round her neck due to an allergic reaction to a flea collar. She always wakes at first light and thinks that I should also be up making her breakfast and over the years she has developed various ways of making me oblige; she meows, she stomps on me, head butts me, gives me horrible wet kisses, combs my hair with a paw that has probably just come out of the cat tray and if that fails she will systematically knock everything off of my bedside table. When she was younger I could happily push her off but now she is so old and stiff I can't do that so I get up and we enjoy the early morning together.

Dusk is also a favourite time of day for me and I usually find myself gazing out of the window instead of watching the TV. It is a good time to spot roe deer as they creep out of the wood to graze and with the warmer weather our bats have usually awoken from their winter sleep in the fir tree but this year I have only seen one so I think the others may have succumbed to the freezing winter weather we had. Very sad.