Rural Life

Something weird happened during the week

The first I knew about it was when I was walking down through the Orchard, admiring some newly appeared bee orchids.

I thought the long grass looked a bit odd and assumed that either young badgers had come out of the set and had been dancing around, or that the local boar had been through on their way to dig up a neighbouring field.  But then I found other evidence that had nothing to do with pigs or boar or badgers.

So I carried on down to the ponds, and there found a lot of the shrubbery had been pushed around and broken and someone had been wading in my pond!

I doubt the fish were happy when it happened, and they aren't happy now, as there is so little water available for them.  I am hoping to get someone in, to get them out, and transfer them to a deeper pond.  I will be sorry to see them go of course, but I don't think they will survive the summer in our pond.

Yes, some neighbouring heifers got bored, broke through the single strand of electric fence, followed the path the hunters take, and gambolled in the Orchard before being taken away again (the wire has been reconnected it appears).  As far as I can tell, there is no film or photo of this episode on the trail camera, as it was pointing in slightly the wrong direction, but I will be checking when I download all the files, as it is home to have its batteries recharged.

In the meantime, here are two different hares passing through.

Have a good week!

 

Wildlife at home and a look back at The Broads visit

The trail camera moved a while back but the grass around it got so long, we had problems with anything other than camouflage photos of what went through.  I pulled up some bits and bobs but then John strimmed through and now we can see rather better who or what is around.  Moths!  Which don't photograph well.  The deer are back but again not a good picture.  No sign of that wretched coypu again - perhaps it has wandered off?  The hare is around though, and always so beautiful to see!

Next week I will write about orchids - they are slowly coming out.  Of course I may forget...  Yesterday and today have been about getting work done to ensure food later in the summer and autumn.  I saw some small and not dead yet tomato plants in a local supermarket, so succumbed, although I know they will cause me heartache, not least if we have a moist and humid summer.  Anyway, I had the space and we have the 20 litre plastic cloches (well former heating fuel canisters), so yesterday I cleaned up the space a bit and planted the tomatoes next to the chillies and aubergines I bought at the vide grenier last week.  If they do well, there is most of a ratatouille there, I just need to set off the courgette plants.

So now for the travelogue - The Broads are very beautiful but in a rather bleak way.  But as soon as you get up on to a bit of higher land (say 40 feet above sea level), you are into standard East Anglian rolling farmland.  This on the World War II discovery circular path that goes out from Acle and I was standing by a disused and overgrown pill box.

But out in the middle of the Broads, like here down on Halvergate Marshes, you get the feel of the immensity of the sky and the landscape.  This is looking towards Mutton's Mill, but if I looked 90º to the West, there was a clump of another 3 or 4 mills.  There are spots where you can see up to 8 or 9, but some are now surrounded by trees or have fallen down.  Mutton's Mill will be having the scaffolding taken down once the driveway dries out, then the refurbished sails will be put back on and it will be magnificent.  By September all work should be completed.

Suffolk Wildlife Trust's Carlton Marshes reserve is being extended along the River Waveney, and there are accessible hides and landing stages, lots of nesting and migrating birds and some nice cattle keeping the scrub down.  The Trust has been able to rebuild the visitor facilities to create a magnificent café area, for use by visitors and by local community groups (there was a Knit and Natter group there when I visited).  The floor to ceiling window over the Marshes gives a mesmerising view.

RSPB Strumpshaw is another rather splendid reserve and well appreciated by locals and twitchers who come vast distances to see the birds there.  At one end of the Reserve there is Strumpshaw Pump House - a engine house for pumping water, so a different generation to the windmills.  It has a rather impressive chimney that is a navigation point out on the marshes.  The pump house itself has an interesting architecture and has been renovated and a bat box put on the outside although with so much natural habitat close by, it isn't that well used.  A new, wildlife bench has been installed and is wonderfully tactile.

Whitlingham Country Park and Broad is close to Norwich and the most accessible part, and will have Changing Places toilets installed by September too.  As with all the Broads, it is man-made, but more recent than the others, dating back only to the last century.  It is home however to at least 78 confirmed different species including bittern and otters.  I met Egyptian geese there - pretty, but a non-native invasive species.

Well, that's it for this week.  Next week I will be back to purely French subjects.

 

Not staying on top of things

I set off on my glorious adventure to the UK something like two and a half weeks ago, and I have been home for a week and I am still chasing my tail trying to catch up on all fronts.  I've not downloaded the lovely photos of the Broads and my visit to the UK, I've not written up my notes from my visit, I've not caught up with all my clients in France, I've not planted all the potatoes yet, I've not got to grips with the garden or the window boxes or the fridge or planning meals or anything.  I feel totally inadequate! 

Yesterday we did do the village "vide grenier" or car boot sale, so actually getting anything sorted out for that was a last minute effort, and we didn't have as much stuff on display as perhaps we would have liked.  But we were there!

Actually it was probably rather a good thing that we didn't have too much stuff out on display, and certainly no books or clothes.  That was a deliberate choice as the weather the day before wasn't brilliant.  Even so we got rid of some big items, although we did feel a bit mugged by two wee munchkins who cut down our ticket price on a cauldron by 50%!  Still, when the rain came, it was heavy and quite long duration, so it was good we didn't have fabrics other than the table covering.

We hung on for another hour, but there were no paying punters, so we legged it early and were able to spend time drying everything we hadn't sold and putting it away carefully for next year.  

The trail camera has moved and been installed on a track used a lot by the local fauna.  The grass around it was very long, so there has been limited action, although a nice bunny did pop up one day.

Rather less appealing and also rather less welcome was a suspected sighting of a coypu.  As we are desperate to keep the water in the ponds to support the 5 rather large fish (plus the army of noisy frogs and the ducks), we don't really want coypu digging into the banks and potentially draining the pools into the ditches below.  They are also a non-native, invasive species that really has no place in France, and certainly not somewhere where there is very little water held in the wetland anyway.

A much more welcome visitor was this Red Admiral butterfly I found yesterday sunning himself after a shower.  My Dad used to make up stories for me about a Red Admiral and a Painted Lady, which I am sure had a subversive subtext.  It is a shame I can't remember any of them, and that he didn't write any down as far as I know.

We had a visitor of a different sort today at the Garden - easy enough for me to hear, as I was having mud smeared over me by a cat, but it wasn't until it was nearly overhead that John heard it over the noise of the rotavator and through his ear protectors.  The Air Force still use the local airport, even though little else does nowadays, and this looks like a pretty heavy cargo plane - possibly one used for refuelling others in flight?  I'm sure someone will tell me!

We also went for a walk around the One Acre Wood to admire the lily of the valley, see some wild medlar flowers, and be enchanted by the veil of green that has crept up on us.  It was rather sadder to see that a number of the large chestnuts have not survived some very difficult growing conditions.  First it was the new invasive wasp that targeted sweet chestnuts, and weakened them by growing its young in the leaf buds.  Then the plot next door was clear felled about three years ago, changing the light and drainage patterns.  Then last year's drought and fierce heat, and finally a dry February all seem to have contributed to a number of trees having no leaves at all this year.  While good for our heating needs, we have to hope that cutting down the dead trees will encourage new growth from the boles, as many are several hundred years old.

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I don't know if the last photo will come out when you read this - but I really can't bear trying to reload them all again!

Finally here is a purple orchid we spotted in a ditch near the wood - they seem a bit late this year, and I am observing the progress of the bee orchids as I think we have a problem!

Until next week!

 

 

It's springing!

This afternoon I heard a cuckoo.  As someone else in the area has also said they have heard a cuckoo too, I'm calling it, it's now officially spring.  With spring comes the first vide grenier (car boot but it lasts all day), which we went along to this morning, saw loads of chums and got a useful implement, commonly known as a "truc", which will make getting ivy off walls a lot easier.  A bargain at only one Euro too.

I moved the trail camera to see what is invading the Garden area before we block off the hole in the fence (sometimes it just isn't worth it after all).  So far I don't have any images of that, which is big enough to make a clear path, but I have been hugely entertained by Woody Woodpecker's Missus, who is enjoying the last traces of walnuts from under the least appetising tree.  Here is her best shot - I will load a video in due course.

Something is setting off the camera at night too, but there seems to have been a mist, so I've not been able to spot what it is.  I'm hoping for something more significant than this fellow, because he doesn't really merit a path!

Soon we need to start clearing beds for serious 2023 crops, so we are working our way through the leeks that I heeled in during the dry season last year, but which have enjoyed the heavy clay soil and a damp December and January.  They are really very good, and the best I have grown here in France, though not necessarily up to my Worcester leek standards.

With spring come flowers, and we have some lovely ones at the moment.  The anemones continue to do well, the plain daffodils are still being a host, while the cowslips and the mutant cowslips (being slutty with polyanthus I think) are pinging up everywhere.  Even the fancy daffs are coming out!

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And it wouldn't be spring in France without a demonstration or two, although this one at la Flèche on Wednesday wasn't making that much of an impression on the guy loading his market goodies into his car.  A long stretch of main road through the town had traffic stopped while the police escorted about 200 union members, their wives, mothers and children up the high street and then back down again, back to the Electricity Company offices they were picketing when not marching.  They were happily singing the French sport theme too - Ultranate's Free from Desire, but didn't know most of the words other than the nanananas.

Next week's edition might be a bit late for a number of possible reasons - apologies in advance.

 

Thinking about spring

Although it's March, it's not quite spring yet, but something is definitely stirring out there.  Of course some say that spring starts at the beginning of March and I can quite see that, but I'm going to wait for the equinox this year before I call it.  It's not that we have had snow this last week - far from it, in fact.  Today we had the hammock out for the first time this year, and pronounced it to be good.  I had a lovely quarter of an hour, relaxing, covered in large cats, and for part of the time at least, watching a magnificent woodpecker in one of the walnut trees.

I did do some spring-like work in the potager, in that I got around to planting the yellow onion sets I bought a few weeks ago.  Someone on one of the forums who is a bit further north than us talked about having their onion sets planted between the autumn sown broad beans, so that when the beans are done in June or so, the onions can let rip and use the nitrogen fixed by the bean roots.  Someone else poo-pooed that, but on the forums you can normally find someone who will swear blind that black is white.  Anyway, why not give it a whirl?  The onions can't really do any worse than they did last year!!

The plants are certainly starting to get into the swing of things.  The daffodils are coming out, although the more fancy narcissi are a long way behind, and the anemones I planted back at the end of 2021 are putting on another good display this year.

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No trail camera images this week I'm afraid, but a distant view of a small flock of cattle egrets along with next door farmer's cattle, doing whatever cattle egrets do.  I first became aware of them six years ago, when we went to Guadeloupe.  There, people park a cow anywhere where there is a bit of grass, and then each cow seems to have up to a dozen attendant egrets.  But now we have huge flocks of them in mainland France, some with more than a hundred birds, like a snow drift across a field.  I gather it is a sign of climate change as they have moved north from Africa.  They are lovely to look at but not right in the scheme of things.

I spotted something else that doesn't seem right yesterday too.  I was looking at the ponds at the bottom of The Orchard - I am now the proud owner of a pond dipping kit and was checking them out, to plan my first play.  I was hoping to spot a bit of spawn perhaps.  I didn't see any spawn, but was pleased that the level of the ponds has risen a bit with the recent rain, although we need so much more as they are a good 6 to 8 inches below where they should be at this time of year.  Then I heard a swish and a plop and looking across, saw the back and dorsal fin and tail of a rather large fish - when I say large, probably about 8 to 10 inches long.  Naturally it took a while for me to remember to get my phone out to take a picture and it was too far away, but I got something anyway, as you can see.  No, really!  My bumper book of Freshwater Fish says it could be Roach or Rudd, but to me the bigger questions are how did it get there, why haven't I seen it before, what does it live on and will it survive?

Today from The Shack we needed to visit another property, to check on something, and the easiest route, or at least the route we took, went through the area devastated by the forest fire last summer.  I got out of the car to take a couple of pictures and also a video.  It was most odd.  It was very quiet - no trees for the wind to rustle through, few birds, certainly many fewer than at The Shack, where they are raucous at the moment, and an overwhelming scent of pine, like someone had been spraying toilet duck around.  I hope that in a few weeks plants will start to reappear, as the black ground is chilling to look at.

So that's it for this week - I'm not sure what will be on the menu next week, but am sure that nature and life will surprise me!

 

 

 

And just about animals

So last week I featured the best photos of each of the bird species captured on the trial camera.  This week I will do the same with the animals - and the period coved is late November to late February, so everyone very much in winter mode.  Having said that, there was a good variety and it was difficult to pick the four best photos for some species, and a December video for most of them too, but I've done my best.  

The first photo is the only one I have of a mouse - otherwise they seem to keep away from the camera.  I know they are around as the cats catch some, but I assumed they were near the buildings.  This one is nearly as far away from a building on the land as you can get!

After that, let's stick to alphabetical order on what has been spotted (ignoring cat, dog, human and hunter).  The badgers are around and about.  I need to sort out more video of them as there is clear evidence of more than one individual, but for now, here are some photos and a video of a badger getting surprisingly up close and personal with the camera.

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Then there are the boar - less keen on the edge of the meadow, although they are making a mess of it, but quite keen on their trail around the ponds.  From the paper I gather that a sow can have two litters a year, of between 8 and 13 piglets - they are prolific and with no natural predators, so numerous but shy.

 

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The deer love the edge of the meadow and were also very apparent along the trail by the pond.  Apologies that some of the photos are just links - I think the internet is a bit overcrowded this evening.

 

And the deliberate errors there were that I didn't do a gallery of deer photos and the video name should be December 22 deer - you really can't get the staff!  Then there is the fox.  As we don't have chickens at that site, I'm pleased to see him or her.

My particular favourite by the meadow is the hare that has a hideyhole somewhere in the bank of brambles.  We know roughly where as there is a tunnel in and a tunnel out, and the camera was by one of the entrances.

And finally my much loved pine martin, although the video shows a rather worrying feature - no tail!  We fear that there is a snare or trap somewhere nearby and it got caught in that, although I guess there are other possibilities including a close encounter with an owl or a car.  Anyway, he looks distinctly odd without a tail.

 

Next week there may be more animal videos, but there will certainly be a review of the winter, as we are now into what can be classed as Spring (well March anyway).  Apologies for layout challenges - internet speed on a Sunday evening and perhaps the image files weren't as compressed as they should have been.

 

Just about birds

Last week, after the hunters had been through, we brought the trail camera home to recharge the batteries (rather good - in general they only need doing every couple of months or so), dry it out a bit, and download all the files of what it had recorded.  There were 714 photographs and 713 video streams - that is an awful lot to work through, triage, delete etc.  I download everything onto my desktop computer, clear the SD card (it's a big one, but even so there are limits!), so I can work through everything in slow time (should such a thing ever exist).

I've been through the first 460 photographs in detail, removing a lot that were either nodding bits of vegetation, things were going on beyond the reach of the infrared camera at night, or where the lens had fogged up or frosted up.  In addition, I removed a bunch of not very interesting images as well.  That has still left some 140 images to work with, and that is before I get onto the videos.

Today I have focussed on birds, as there was a lot of bird activity before New Year where the camera was placed.  Next week I will show the animal activity there.  Most varieties were captured more than once by the camera, but the Green Woodpecker only turned up once among the files.

The most persistent visitors were the blackbirds.  I assume it is a breeding pair, but it could have been a whole family - I'm afraid they all look the same to me.  They really do enjoy turning over leaves!

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Another frequent visitor was a thrush - I love them, but don't get to see them, I just hear them and find their anvils surrounded by snail shells, so it is lovely to see them in the feather, so to speak.  If you click on the link, the picture does show up, I've no idea why it doesn't show with the others.

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The male or cock pheasant is a more frequent visitor to the camera - I think he likes to show off - but a hen did come around too for contrast.

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Much more difficult to spot, but very seasonal for when these photos were taken, was a robin that had a good scrummage round the area for a week or two.  He is practically round as it was very cold at that stage.

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So that's your lot for this week, next week I will look at the animals that were operating in that area from mid-November to the 1st January when the camera moved on.  And I will include video too!  Probably

 

Animals, and the challenge of being a trail camera

After last week's unabashedly food oriented post, it's back to what people seem to be interested in - animals!

The trail camera was at the side of a patch of scrub during December, which brought a lot of "exciting" footage of blackbirds and thrushes turning over leaves, the odd sighting of the pine martin and badgers, but the main visitor was a hare who has a lair somewhere in the brambles and whose front path came out by the camera.  They are such beautiful creatures!

Anyway, fickle me got bored with blackbirds so I moved the trail camera to by a couple of ponds that are at the bottom of the Orchard, and for a couple of weeks got nothing more exciting than a hunter's bottom (fully clothed I hasten to add), so I moved the camera a short way along the path and waited.  Once again I got a fine shot and video of a passing hunter - I really do need to put a warning sign up that they are being filmed.  It won't stop them coming through but they can't sue me if I post the film; currently they could.

Anyway, despite the hunters passing through during daylight hours, the boar are knocking around at night time.

The deer are also around and pass through singly or in pairs.

 

The badgers trundle through - now picking off my phone the videos I want to download isn't easy, and while there is some nice footage, there is some of a limping badger that I wanted to share and this isn't it, but frankly sometimes life is too short on a Sunday!

I hinted that the life of a trail camera isn't totally easy.  Ours is currently a challenge to a Great Tit, and keeps getting investigated and attacked by that.  Have the sound up if you can too!

And given the fact that the camera is a good meter or more off the ground, if it had been a bit lower, it might not have survived this encounter either!

More excitement from the trail camera next week!

 

Winter activity

January is doing what January does - mostly it is cold, sometimes it is wet too.  Anticyclones at this time of year tend to mean that any moist air is trapped at low levels giving annoying, thin cloud, mist and fog, and if the air is dry, you can see for miles but it is jolly cold.  We've been having a bit of both of those, and quite frankly I am fed up with having cold feet, even when wearing my fleecy socks.  But the views can be lovely!

There are of course the hints that spring will happen - birds have been incredibly noisy the last week, and today there were woodpeckers hammering morse code messages to each other, and a thrush dealing with the last of the walnuts and any snails it can find.  Looking down there are many orchid rosettes appearing - they won't all flower this year, but the corms will be building resources - as well as timid snowdrops and the early signs of the swathes of narcissus that will adorn the top of the Meadow in a few weeks' time.  At the other end of the scale, cyclamen corms are rebuilding their strength after a prolific flowering season in the autumn, but the leaves will start to fade as the spring bulbs take over.

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The trail camera has moved and last Sunday, after I had been and downloaded images, there was deer activity.

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This is a particularly cheeky shot!

The badger is also out and about, but only at night!

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Finally, there was also a boar and a fox doing the rounds.

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The past week has also been Truffle Week, but with a few more meals to go, I will save a recipe by recipe account of 100g of best black truffle for next week.

 

Proper winter weather

It's January in the Northern Hemisphere, and despite 2022 being the warmest year on record, we are currently enjoying proper winter weather.  Okay so we don't have snow, but actually I don't mind missing out on the white stuff as I have twice weekly physiotherapy sessions at the moment and getting to those would be so much more complicated if there was white stuff on the ground.  But proper frosty weather and for quite a few days - it's good for the soil, the trees, makes parsnips sweeter and (I gather) Brussel sprouts more flavoursome - well, it has to be good.  The downside is that low winter sun on a frosty day makes for too much contrast on photos to be really good - for example:

On the other hand, honing in on fine detail can be a bit easier, with all that contrast:

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That is very nice carved detail over those windows!

The gardens can't really be worked at the moment, although when there is a bit of thaw, it's quite good for getting persistent weeds out.  It is traditional to slaver over seed catalogues at this time of year, but I have a big box with loads of free seed packets, so no need to buy new, just try to work out somewhere with enough warmth and light to get the seeds growing once March is here - anything sown direct is too vulnerable to chickens, cat bottoms, slugs, snails, being trodden on, being bullied by weeds, birds, drought, frost, flood, and heavy clay soil.  Weeds do remarkably well.  We had 5 seeds of giant parsnip we were given before Brexit made such things impossible.  We sowed them late (they don't like being stored) so were lucky two germinated and grew, and benefitted from the water the chickens didn't want in the drought conditions.  Finally this morning, John dug one up for our dinner - yummy!

The biggest we have grown in France (our biggest in the UK weighed over 2 pounds, and was 18 inches long of usable parsnip, but that really was a mutant!).

Last weekend I moved the trail camera as while all I had captured was a hunter's bottom, there was clear evidence that around the ponds, something was lurking!

In addition, the badger trail (which is visible on Google Earth surprisingly), is looking even more obvious than usual.

But at this time of year, the larger animals head for wooded areas, although the deer will likely be back in March or so I think.  While there is a lot of bird activity, unless we have the camera trained on a food station, it is very haphazard and difficult to catch, and frankly I have more than enough video footage of blackbirds and thrushes turning over leaves.  So it is the smaller, shyer, and less flashy animals I am looking for - foxes, badgers, ducks, the pine martin, mice, rats, perhaps even a coypu (although I really hope not).  Well, it paid off this week after the move - a badger bottom and a fox face!  Hopefully they will get a bit more used to the camera and I'll get more.

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I also need to get going on my campaign of attracting tits, particularly blue and great tits, as they are very good at eating pine processionary caterpillars and the pine trees have a few too many nests in for my liking.  The needles shed by the caterpillars are extremely irritating, and the rashes and swelling they cause last a good couple of weeks with no real remedy other than wrapping the affected part in wet towels so you can't scratch.  They can be deadly to animals, and have until recently no natural predators as they are a non-native invasive species.  But the birds are doing their thing, so feeders and nest boxes need to be set up in the next few weeks.  The feeders were very successful last year.

So, another frosty week in prospect for us, stay warm!