Day 15 - 'ands Orf My 'Taters

Mystery Nibbler

Living in the country can bring all sorts of unexpected drama and intrigue into your life.  And the longer you spend here, the more you attune...and the more you attune, the more you find.

There's quite a variety of wildlife in the valley where we live.  There are deer in the woods and fields around us (roe and muntjac, at least), badgers and foxes are fairly common, rabbits are aplenty, and hare can sometimes be seen, if you know where and when to look.   

Bats circle the house every evening through the summer months, pips and brown long-eared most frequently.   The BLE's will take moths that are drawn to the light at the window 2 feet from where I'm sitting.

I even saw a wild boar once, out in the middle of a ploughed field half a mile down the lane.

Birds are many and varied - we counted 17 or 18 species in an hour, last time we did the Birdwatch survey.   Buzzards are ever present, as are crows, rooks, and the occasional raven.  Woodpeckers are regular visitors to the bird feeders, along with the many tits, finches and the usual garden birds...

Reptiles are well represented too...I've seen grass snakes just over the road, frogs and newts in the pond 30m away, and had a toad living in a hole in the garden (and once sneaking into the house, much to Bluez' chagrin). 

The more you look, the more you see, but even though actual sightings are less common, there are always signs of activity.  

We like looking for signs!  Always, whilst walking the dogs, we are subconsciously scanning for clues.  One of our favourite things is to go walking in the fields and woods after a good snowfall, and find all the fresh footprints, to see what's been passing whilst we weren't there. 

Anna is an expert wildlife sign spotter.  She can spot a buzzard sitting in a winter tree from 150m, and smell the recent passage of a fox.    If you find some nibbled grass, Anna will tell you whether it was a mouse or a vole that did the nibbling (and which mouse or vole it was).

The first proper conversation that Anna and I had consisted of Anna patiently explaining how to tell the difference between fox poo and otter poo (it's all about shape and texture, and possibly something about taste too...ew). 

As a little demonstration of the sort of thing we find ourselves embroiled in, have a good look at the photo above (click on it to make it larger so you can see the detail).

For context, last year, Anna grew some potatoes in a bag in the garden.   At the time, the yield wasn't great - we had a few small potatoes with one meal.    The bag has continued to sit outside doing its own thing ever since. 

Today we found the little crime scene pictured above.    Did you have a good look?  What did you deduce, if anything? 

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Firstly, note the neat little circle of soil that has been kicked onto the path.  It looks like it's been dug out of the bag.  In support of this, a few small potatoes have been unearthed.  They've also been scattered, some down onto the path.   If you look closely at these, you'll see some of them have been nibbled, some quite a lot.  

So what has done this?   We haven't done the full forensics yet.  This would include a search for incriminating poo (of course), any signs of anything else having been nibbled, and could even stretch to measuring the bite size (you can see a handy single bite out of the lower left potato).  

The smart money (Anna, obviously) is on a rodent...possibly mouse but more likely rat.  A squirrel might be a good outside bet.   What sort of mouse?  Well, we know we have house mouse just the other side of the wall (in the Shouthouse (our brick-built outhouse/shed thing)), and there are field and wood mouse (or are they the same thing?!) in the hedgerows, along with voles, shrew, pygmy shrew, moles, weasels, rats and stoats (most of which have been caught and killed and left in the house by Loz, resident killer cat).

 So, why is all of this so important?

Well, erm...it's not...not really.  

But it's real life happening, and there's lots of it about...

Now I think about it, I realise that what it all boils down to is:

These are our neighbours...and I'm nosey!