Rural Life

The final days of 2024

A few days before Christmas, our elderly neighbour tapped on the door to complain that our grey chicken was making a mess of her garden.  I immediately went to check the chicken run, and all 5 and a half feathery demons were safely impounded, but closer inspection of her garden did show something that looked like chicken damage.  In order to investigate this, I brought home one of the trail cameras, that had been placed where I wanted a particular shot - more of that a bit later.  I cleared off the files and reset the camera with a view of the foot of the washing line posts in next door's garden, so it wouldn't catch anyone human's face or even feet, and left it for a week.  I wondered if a dog was popping in or a cat was being unhelpful. 

I retrieved the camera yesterday and checked.  The first image was a cat, not one of ours, but on our side of the fence.  The second was one of our cats and on our side of the fence.  The third was the rogue grey chicken, and yes, it was one of ours - Groucho!  The fourth image was a wild bird and that was it.

The shame of it!!

The trail camera had been placed overlooking the pond that used to have large fish in it, until it silted up and sprung a leak.  I was convinced it was used by boar for having the odd mud bath, so set the camera to see if I was right.  Most of the images were of birds using the shallow areas for bathing and drinking and questing for worms, but the first two files confirmed that boar will go in there for a plodge when the mood takes them.

There is also a short video of what he was getting up to.

That trail camera has now been reset and positioned somewhere else, and in about 10 days I will get another in for a check over and to download anything good.

Christmas happened - very quietly!  We have tried to be restrained with food, but scallops are in season, and there are the small matters of Christmas cake and Christmas pudding.  I'm sure we will be good in 2025 - or that's what we are telling the GP!

While in general the weather hasn't been conducive to nice long walks in the country, we did get out on Monday to do firewood.  It was a better day than most that we chose for that, and looking up in the One Acre Wood, there was a hint of blue in the sky and the occasional glint of sunlight.  

However when we went back yesterday to carry on the good work, the air was thick and moist and you could barely see 200 metres down into the valley.  On a good day from this point, you can see for over 5 kilometres!

There are rumours that the Dunkelflaute (see the week before last's blog) will dissipate in the New Year - I'll believe it when I see it.  Tomorrow is another Red Day for electricity prices, so while I am sure someone is making a lot of money in electricity generation, we will be huddled around the log fire or doing active things outside to keep warm, assuming we can find a way to energize ourselves!

Have a good week and enjoy your New Year celebrations, however you choose to mark the day.

 

It's that Christmas time of year

2024 is crawling towards its damp and muddy end - today adding strong winds to the mix.  Given the vile weather today, we took the advice of the television weather presenters and found fun indoors, going to the Baugé Christmas market.

For a small town, it packs above its weight in this regard.  Over three days, the cultural centre is taken over by craftspeople, food producers, wine makers, charities and Radio Parcay for a high quality event.  We spent a happy hour going round all the stalls.  We bought nougat from our favourite honey producer, an air plant for the bathroom, because it seemed a nice idea, and were tempted by a book by a local author.  He had a sculpture that visually described his profession in a bad French pun, which he happily explained to us as we were foreign, before telling us about his books. 

People were spending money which has to be good for the local economy, and we managed to miss any of the "special" events that were being put on by local music groups and musicians.  Indoors is too enclosed for a brass ensemble!

The village is nicely adorned with relatively low wattage Christmas lights, while town is festooned with them, as befits a Petit Cité de Charactere d'Anjou.  We can see a few from the house, but they are more in evidence when we walk to and from the pub on a Friday night.

This weekend, the hunters have been out, doing their best to bag a festive deer or boar for Christmas Day, although I'm not sure how lucky they have been.  There were a few fresh tracks in the Meadow and Orchard, as well as some festively coloured poo down by the ponds.  I'm not sure who the culprit is, possibly the pine martens.

A sure sign that winter is with us, is that the bird feeder is starting to get visited.  We put out fat balls from December to mid March for blue tits and great tits, and I think the long-tailed variety and tree creepers like them too.  We aim to attract tits as they will also attack the few nests of pine processionary caterpillars that we have in the pine trees.  Once they get into their stride, I will need to add four fat balls a week to the feeder, at the moment, it is just two every 10 days.

A gleam of brightness in the gardens is nice at this time of year, and some of the roses are putting out odd flowers.  The Silver Wedding rose we were given over 9 years ago has decided to bloom for Christmas, as it often does.  The white flowers are delicately scented and a joy when not much else natural is looking pretty.

So, not much more to be said today other than:

• Pay homage to your household gods
• Eat too much
• Drink too much (and DON'T drive)
• Count your blessings
• Spend time outdoors
• And have a lovely Christmas!

Until next week!

Cold, dull days

There is a German word, Dunkelflaute, which describes a gloomy, windless weather system, that is cold.  We have had that here for the past couple of months, interspersed with periods of just wet, windy and nasty.  Germany is currently suffering a major bout of Dunkelflaute, and that is placing a really heavy strain on the European electricity network.  Germany's electricity generation includes some 20GW wind capacity, and currently the turbines are not turning.  The knock on effect, combined with two country interconnectors being down, is that the power grids are doing all they can to reduce peak electricity use.  In the UK, you might spot a slight fluctuation down in power.  Here in France, if you are on the extremely interesting Tempo electricity contract, it translates into Red Days.  Days when daytime electricity is 3 times the unit price of the regulated tariff.  Tuesday to Friday was like that, and tomorrow will be too.  It is rather constraining!

The run into Christmas isn't totally fun when your feet and hands are always cold, and you are keeping the lights off as long as possible!  There are odd rays of joy - the very last cyclamen flowers are still going in the One Acre Wood for example.

There is little to photograph at the moment, as nothing much changes with the dull weather, and when you do take a photo, such as of a small amount of water in the lower pond in the Wood, it is singularly underwhelming.

I have had to resort to searching trail camera archives to find pretty photos.

The jay is handsome, although not as handsome as the male pheasant (who knows it too!).

However today, my spirit bird is this rather hacked off female pheasant.  I can feel my blood pressure boiling over the stupidity of HMRC and the unfairness of the amount of tax they suddenly feel I need to pay every month.  This is not good for me, so I need to go and find somewhere warm and cosy and try to forget about it all.  Being near computers only makes it worse!

Isn't she splendid?  Actually, just looking at her makes me feel better!

Anyway, I hope your week is not affected by Dunkelflaute, and now I had better get back to writing Christmas cards!

 

Reflections on Trail Cameras

It has been another strange week for us, with pretty nasty weather, friends over from the UK, a cat needing eye drops very frequently and weather that continues to depress.  While the good news is that we seem to have saved Poirot's eye, we are still on a regime of regular eye drops (two sorts, each every four hours) to shift the rather tenacious ulcer that caused the problem.

What has been going on the past couple of weeks, is that I have brought in for checks two out of the three trail cameras dotted around the Meadow and the Orchard.  I think we have had trail cameras for the past three years, and it has been a learning curve.  The first one was excellent, with a capability of checking what was on it remotely, well, about 6 feet away, and it took rechargeable batteries and was a delight.  But after about 18 months a small piece of plastic gave way, and as it was the on/off switch, it was quite an important bit of plastic, so a pity it wasn't stronger!.  Reluctantly, the supplier offered us a new one, as it was still within its two year guarantee, but as that model was no longer available, I had to go "posher".  The new one was Bluetooth and very funky, but didn't like rechargeable batteries, needed 12 AA batteries in any case, and basically blew up two SD cards.  After a lot of hassle I got that replaced, but I wasn't happy.  Instead I got a pack of three very simple trail cameras, taking rechargeable batteries, each only needing four AA batteries anyway, but with no remote or WiFi capability.

These have turned out to be excellent.  Robust, easy to understand, not overly heavy on batteries and I can put them up and leave them for 6 to 10 weeks and not worry about them.  When I bring them in for cleaning, a battery check and to download what is on the SD card, I then have a lot of work on my hands.

Assuming I have found a good place to put the camera (and that in itself is an art), I have anywhere between 200 and 2,000 files to go through and check.  I would say that between a third and a half of all files can be ditched easily - they are of my bottom walking away from the camera, or something interesting went past too fast for the camera to spring into life.

At first, I would also hang onto partial images - a fox's tail, a disappearing badger bottom, a blur of something that might be interesting.  Now I am more selective, although as with the image below, I've not a clue what it is, but it is big and interesting!

Quite often the photos are a bit blurred, although some are enchanting.  The videos take up a lot of space, and are a mixed bunch.  These badgers are lovely, but why do they have to be off to the right of the image?

Or something really interesting is going on but just a couple of metres too far away from the camera to be stunning.

Some things are nice, but could do with a bit more context.

Other captures would be really excellent if the wretched animal didn't decide to do most of what they were doing behind a tree!

Some would be great, if only the subject had decided to do the really interesting thing during daylight hours for that extra crispness.

Sometimes however, things are nearly perfect, and I could try to kid  you that they are deliberate!

And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, things work just right!  That magpie was just begging for his close up!

I know magpies aren't favourite birds, they are a bit mean and they make a lot of noise, but they act like they have characters.  I also didn't know they liked walnuts!

For anyone who is interested, the cameras are Num'axe PIE1066.  You do need an SD card reader to download the images as well, not supplied with the cameras.  Two have been attacked by deer and boar and have survived, and all have been covered in bird poo from time to time.

I hope you enjoyed the videos and have a good week.

 

Nursing duties

It's been a strange week, with memories of this time last year when my Mum broke a bone in her neck with all the attending panic and worry, added to nursing a poorly pusscat with an abscess behind her eye, while trying to get rid of the last vestiges of a nasty cold that has been doing the rounds.  Nursing duties for the cat have become more and more onerous (we don't begrudge her that), but it has been amusing to see how many of the medicines she has that I have also used, or my Mum needed to use after a corneal transplant.  We are now on drops every hour and a half or so, day and night (assuming we can wake up), and tomorrow we find out whether we have been able to save the eye or not.  I am not optimistic.  

I brought in a trail camera during the week - I wasn't convinced about the batteries, and quite rightly - it had stopped doing night time photos and videos at the end of October!  The change in the activity by this trail camera (it is a favourite position to leave one as there is a lot of activity) between the summer and October was extensive.  The ducks that used to waddle past most days are not to be seen at all.  There are only one or two shots of coypu and none at all of boar (although if they were around after dark, the camera wouldn't have picked them up as it was out of juice).  The pine martens are still in the zone and bouncing around very happily, which pleases me hugely.  One is larger than the other, so I'm not sure if it is a couple or parent and offspring.

There has also been some bird activity, with a Great Tit visiting more than once to see what might be lurking on the tree trunk by the camera.  We encourage this species as they have adapted to become predators of pine processionary caterpillars, which are nasty, non-native invasive dangerous critters.  There are a few caterpillar nests in the pine trees, so we do what we can with bird nest boxes and limited winter feeding to attract the birds that will predate.

The foxes are also around and there are some nice still photos that I need to work on to show what they are up to, but the stars so far of this batch of files have been the deer.  Any fear they have had in the past of the camera has gone and they quite happily stand by it and in front of it and show off their best and not so best sides!

 

 

 

It seems to me that deer spend a lot of time itching and waggling their ears.

After a certain amount of nagging, I made the Christmas cakes on Wednesday, so still in November but a little on the late side in my view.  They have already been "fed" once, and I will do them again shortly.  There is a wonderful stall in the market at la Flèche that sells loose preserved fruits, including not one, but two varieties of glacé cherries, three varieties of sultanas and 5 varieties of candied citrus peel, and is the only place I know in France to supply dried currants.  As I have stocks of treacle and the chickens provide eggs, while we have a fine range of our own eau de vie, there is no excuse for the cakes not being luxurious and alcoholic!  Here is the mixing, and if you are good, there may be a picture of the decorated cakes in due course.

This autumn is one of the wettest on record, so it should have been no surprise to us that the two small ponds in the One Acre Wood now have water in them, a full two months before our earliest sighting up to now (so in the last 18 years).  They are not natural ponds, but rather pits that were dug to provide clay for making bricks and roof and floor tiles (the chestnut coppice provided the heat to fire the bricks and tiles, while the few pine trees provided a resin to seal the tiles before baking).  As such they are on clay, but with years of leaf litter build up on top, and when the clay contracts when it is dry, the water soaks away.  Currently the clay is swollen with water and so the ponds form.  Newts and salamanders like them for breeding purposes, so I am hoping they will last and we will have lots of babies in the spring.

So now it is time for the next batch of cat eye drops - this time it is serum made from horse bodily fluids (so not one my Mum used to have), then in another hour and a half, it will be antibiotic eye drops, and so on all through to tomorrow afternoon.  We are fortunate that Poirot is a very gentle and forgiving old lady, and that she is very food orientated, which is making this process manageable on most levels.  I'm not keen on getting up in the night however!

Have a good week!