Hi Nic
Been taking a break from the internet & concentrating on being outside as it’s the first summer in memory that I’ve been able to do that for many reasons.
Rather hope you’ll be having hoglets visiting after the mentions of a female being slightly larger & Digger’s hopeful but fairly slow beau making (apparently unsuccessful but who knows what goes on off camera!!) advances to her.
The claggy mess on the male hog could seriously affect his ability to curl up if attacked, also presumably could collect other matter if he goes too near something he shouldn’t. Hateful idiotic people doing such stupid things, makes me mad too.
What with your robin, the frogs on your tub ponds, house martins & bees in the martin nest you really have a piece of nature to be proud of. Last year I’m quite sure we had bumbles in the roof as I’d see them on the wall heading upwards & disappearing & Frankie & Minx spent a lot of time looking up at the ceiling in the room underneath.
Baby sparrows must have left the nest here I think, been plenty in the garden & that’s for sure. Judging by the activity in the borders there are lots of insects for them, sparrows in & out, up & down stems everywhere.
Also lots of butterflies, but all either large or small Whites visiting the verbena bonariensis, stock & geraniums. Just the one Brimstone I mentioned a few weeks ago & haven’t seen any more since.
The Escallonia in my front garden is absolutely plastered in bumbles & assorted other bees & insects. It’s covered in pink flowers, has shot up at least a foot in height when I wasn’t looking & is causing comment from neighbours because of all the bees. The noise is amazing when you stand by it & it’s so lovely to see them with their legs thick with pollen.
The bat detector I bought a few years ago is a Magenta Bat5, I particularly like it because it has a lit up display so you can see the frequency you’re tuning to & also a built in torch which has its uses when you’re stumbling about in the dark! On bat walks with the council we were given detectors with & without the display & I found this one easy as then you pretty much know what bat it is straight away as long as you have an idea of how to tell – there are lists on the internet, the simplest one is on Staffordshire Bat Group’s site.
http://www.staffordshirebats.btck.co.uk/Information/Frequencies
The bats we get here are Pipistrelles, have seen Daubentons whizzing about over lakes on bat walks too, really acrobatic!
Needless to say no hog activity here, with the countryside ever getting distant with the huge amount of building going on they’ll be up against it even more. Instead of less than half a mile to countryside we are now becoming several miles from it. Swathes of green fields turned to brown dry earth with timber framed soul-less ‘posh’ homes going up at a rate of knots. So sad. Traffic is already heavy here as we’re on the route into the city from the countryside, the type of homes going up are not the ones where people will use the bus, they’re firmly in the more than one car bracket. That’s the road Frankie used once too often & he won’t be the last to suffer the consequences.
The poppies in my profile were last year’s probably , they have been rubbish this summer, don’t like the dry & heat, strange as I’d have thought they were conditions they’d thrive in. Must have adapted to wind & rain which is what they usually get.
Hope to hear some happy news & the patter of tiny feet from your garden!
