Sounds like hard work keeping the marauding cats out, I’d like to see the anti cat barriers you’ve erected! It would be very much safer for cats if they stayed in at night & hugely beneficial to assorted wildlife too I’m sure. Frankie being a feral when he moved in with us had firm ideas about when he did or didn’t go out & found ways to ensure he got his way on the subject. It’ll be forever a regret to me that I wasn’t able to keep him in safely at night, he’d learned to sleep & stay in for the majority of it but still went out for usually one brief foray if only for a quick toilet visit. He wasn’t at all impressed with the litter tray, used it only for doing No. 1’s when it was snowing & he was utterly desperate – he actually bit me the first time I put him in it to start teaching him to use it! He was scandalised at Sumo & Minx doing No. 2’s in it.
No sign of hogs here, the mice are still enjoying the food I put out. Sadly when I was out litter picking a few weeks ago one of the others found a poorly baby hedgehog in a lane nearby, it was taken to a vet but was too far gone to be saved. Hate to think what must have happened to others from it’s family as it’s unlikely to have been the only one.
Wonder if Siili is still turning up late every night in your garden. Re builders installing hedgehog holes in fencing they said they would be as a matter of course up the road but I wonder if they actually have. Those nest bricks that can be installed in new builds in the walls/roofs are also a brilliant idea, I’d like to see it made compulsory for all & any types of wildlife homes to become part of new buildings. Decided not to block my roof hole so my sparrows can return this Spring for the 3rd time, hopefully their babies will manage not to fall out & into Minx’s small area. The down pipe has a basket at the top to stop them dropping into it as it’s directly under where they nest, having to pay the window cleaner at the end of nesting to clear the mess they block the gutter with seems a small price to pay to help the little family.
Hope all is well with you. Being blind in one eye with a permanently detached retina it’s been a bit scary round here. I got a hole in the retina in the other eye 18 November & then spent weeks waiting for the hospital to offer me an appointment after the optician spoke to them on the phone. I was shopping in town then went on spec to an optician in the city centre on 28/12 to get them to do an OCT scan for me as I was getting rather worried as time went on (after giving up on the hospital ever contacting me before I ended up with another detached retina). The optician looked at the scan then rang the hospital, who arranged for eye casualty to see me straight away & they did the laser treatment after looking at my eye. Weird sort of Saturday! Check up tomorrow to see if the laser scarring has sealed the hole. Rather hope it has!!
