Hi Annie
I was wondering where you had got to! So disappointed that you haven’t seen any hogs. I was really hoping that with the cam you would see some. It is so strange, when you have your lovely wildlife friendly garden waiting for them. I wonder whether someone has been putting up fences somewhere and blocked their route. Don’t give up. Someone might turn up one night, but I’m not surprised you’re missing them. I wouldn’t like it at all.
Just as well you didn’t get a cam like mine. My second one packed up as well. It also seemed to be a faulty switch. But if the switch doesn’t work it’s not much use. At the same time the other one has gone completely crazy. I was horrified to see 991 videos on it one morning – a very small minority had any hog pics. When the battery gets low the videos get shorter and then it starts flickering. Very irritating. So I had to just pick out random ones to look at and most just got deleted. It seems it started to just keep taking video non-stop until the batteries ran out. There haven’t been quite as many since then and some nights it goes back to it’s normal self – but that means not picking up all the hogs who have visited. Last night was about 600 odd videos, but only because the batteries ran out soon after 11. I have now worked out a system for whizzing through them, but it still takes ages – and half the night’s potential filming is missed. Grrr!
I saw a young pigeon on a barbed wire fence the other day and thought of yours. He/she was swaying around rather alarmingly and at first I thought it was caught. But luckily not – just practising balancing it seems! Do you mean the plastic almost trellis clematis stuff. I have some of that on the fences here and the young sparrows seem to love playing in it. Good idea using it for the bird feeder. I bet you could get some good pics of the birds with your cam.
The hoglets are not so loyal now. There are one or two still coming, but they quite often arrive late so I only see them on the cam. There were two here together a couple of nights ago. No new smaller ones, though.
Digger, thankfully seems to be back to normal again, although last night she made 8 visits in the space of an hour, so I am hoping she might have some hoglets hidden away somewhere, which she is dashing back to check on. She seems to be getting worse than ever at spreading her food around and tipping the bowl of food right over herself! Perhaps in too much of a hurry.
One of the other girls has been missing for about 2 weeks, so, again I am optimistically hoping hoglets are the reason. Most of the big boys have been missing for a while, so Rascal (the one I told you about before) is rather lording it over the place. Not sure how much headway he is making with the girls though. It is getting a bit late for that sort of thing anyway. We don’t really want any more hoglets starting now – they would be likely to end up too light to hibernate.
