Hi Nic
Young Henry hedgehog (time he had a name) is providing entertainment for me & the cats still. Very healthy looking little thing & has grown over the months since first appearing, lovely to see. No markings of an artificial type but in the middle of his forehead he has a little dark strip so very recognisable when he faces the camera. What is strange & maybe means there’s more than one coming is that some pictures very clearly show what I guess is a tail & others don’t show it at all.
I’ve let the grass, weeds & forget-me-nots that have seeded themselves between the paving slabs of my path grow & Henry spends a lot of his time rooting about in the greenery. Plenty of small & fresh food there for him I expect. He scoffs all I put in the food dish most nights & when he doesn’t that presumably means there’s plenty of natural food for him. He’s thriving anyway & wherever he comes from & travels to at night I hope he has a guardian angel looking out for him as I’d hate to be a hog around here.
What a shame about Digger, maybe she just found herself somewhere else she didn’t have to travel so far to get food. At least you know you helped her for a large part of her life & she was safe while she visited your garden.
We have a very tatty magpie youngster who visits noisily, hopefully when he grows up a bit he’ll have some smarter livery as he’s a right mess now. He has no feathers round his neck, just a bald ring, he’s skinny & looks dirty poor creature. He’s good at standing up for himself & gets plenty of fallen food from the feeder. The adults plumage is spectacular when the sun hits it, blues & greens shining, pity they’re so horrible to smaller birds. Yes, I love my collared doves too, we rescued a baby one that was in the middle of the road in the spring & it was a privilege to see the perfect little creature up close.
So glad you have little Splash to watch & that she’s enjoying the bounty of your garden, funny how things change so much with visitors but there are so many changes in the surrounding area aren’t there with building going on & maybe people putting up new fences with no thought for wildlife getting in or out. My next door neighbour has just had her fence replaced on the pavement side & bottom & effectively prevented any animal bigger than a mouse from getting in or out. Lucky for her our mutual boundary fence has spaces in for hogs to get in her garden from mine. Still not a mouse on my camera by the way, wonder where they’ve all gone.
You’ve put your finger on the problem with people as a whole, they’ve no connection at all with wildlife. My neighbours were excited a few years ago as they’d been watching this amazing brown bird they’d never seen before in their garden – it was a female blackbird. I think a step back from the life of needing to shop every week for clothes (how do people find the time to wear all those things?!) going out to eat, having lots of holidays & just relax & watch the world around us to see who we share the planet with would help. Pam’s poem is so sad but so very true in all she says.
My tiny little Mum died last Monday, she was a gentle person who loved animals all her life & she & Dad had quite a few visitors of the hog variety in their gardens over the years. RIP Mum.
