What sort of wildlife visits your garden?


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1 hour ago, FLY2 said:

There's been some horrible big slimy cream coloured slugs around this springtime, but the recent hot weather has certainly had an effect on them ! What happened to the normal brown and black ones ? Anyone know ?

 

They got anew paint job.    Sorry couldn't resist it.  :biggrin:

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Well I had a marvellous surprise last night. I've had neighbours cats activate the outside security lights, as have foxes. I have seen hedgehogs and squirrels too, but last  night was exceptional. I o

Ian  When I first got married and first visited Ireland it was Holy Week and I would have to trapse around with my mother in law visiting relatives as many, as 4 different families a day for an e

Here you are Mary. They come to visit me every day. You have to creep up very quietly, if they spot you....they disappear into the undergrowth.  

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Autumn must be imminent as the local squirrel population is emptying my nut box on an almost daily basis. 

Stocking up for a bad winter no doubt.

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I love seeing the squirrels in my garden!    As far as I know, they don't spread disease like some rats...

The only downside is that they bury the nuts from our cob nut tree,  indiscrimately in the garden.  They then forget about them (can squirrels forget?) and so we have dozens and dozens of tiny little trees growing everywhere, which then have to be pulled up.    Such a waste, really.... if I had a big field, I could plant a small forest of them!

The squirrels have all got the same name btw... it's 'Cyril' because that's how one of the grandchildren used to say 'squirrel'     Lol

 

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My neighbour hates squirrels  for some reason used to shoot at them with an airgun, till I pointed out he was firing into a small wood where children sometimes play.

Like PF he calls them tree rats, why? They don't seem to do any damage or spread disease (at least not round here) so what is it about them that people dislike so much?

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According to the RHS the damage that grey squirrels do is :-

 

 

  • Eating fruits, nuts, seeds, flower buds and vegetables 
  • Dig up and eat bulbs and corms 
  • Raid bird feeders and take eggs from birds’ nests 
  • Damage lawns by burying or digging up winter food stores 
  • Strip bark off trees, especially sycamore, maples, ash and beech 
  • Gnaw on plastic, such as hosepipes and plastic netting

 

 

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Seems more like minor annoyances than a reason to kill.

Cats on the other hand are quoted as killing around 55 million birds a year but no-one advocates shooting them.   ;)

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I can go onto our field and shoot any number of rabbits but they’re a long way from the veg garden so they are not doing us any harm. We could eat them of course. I enjoy rabbit if it’s on the menu but for diy cooking they’re a pain to prepare with having to skin them and pull out the guts. Last time I plucked and dressed a mallard I had to do it out in a greenhouse as you seem to end up with more feathers than you started with! The only thing I will dress now is a crab and that takes about 20 minutes each to extract everything. I often wonder why they call it dressing when it’s really quite the opposite!

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I shoot squirrels if I see them on the shoot,they carry all sorts of diseases I never pick a dead one up with bare hands though, always use a litter picker,put the body in a plastic bag ready for the bin or bon fire, I think you can still get some bounty money from a government agency for their tails,they take young birds and eggs from the nest and I've seen them follow a pheasant along a hedgerow and wipe out the pheasants nest,eggs, chicks the lot, terrible little blighters they are. If you do feed them though make sure you wash your hand really well after handling anything they might have touched

 

Rog

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I don't have any squirrels in my garden, even though I'm quite close to a Parc National which is stuffed with pine trees (Maritime Pine, Pinus pinaster).

The reason is, I think that my trees are mainly palms (they find scaling the rough trunk a problem), citrus trees (they don't like the smell) and agaves (not really trees but they seem repellent to those nasty little rodents). 

 

When they do come into the garden occasionally they provide great entertainment for my dogs who enjoy chasing them around, not being able to climb out of the way. Normally, outside my property, it's the other way round when the dogs can't chase them up the trees.

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Tree rats maybe, but I love them. Ok, a minor annoyance occasionally, but that's nature. I wouldn't be without them !

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I’m with Plantfit all the way on the subject of squirrels. We had a 5 acre wood at the end of our garden (it was ours) when we lived the rural life.  A couple of friends would come over and attempt to keep the squirrel population down with their guns, it didn’t stop the little blighters destroying things like plastic dustbins (we had them in those days).  One day we noticed a squirrel going in and out of a hole in the soffit of a low roof on the house. We’d never even noticed the hole previous to this.   So we watched and waited for the squirrel to come out and my husband screwed a piece of wood over the hole.  A few minutes later we saw the animal chewing away at the wood and getting back inside the low roof.  We went up and emptied the bedroom above, took up some floorboards and then had baby squirrels running all around the room and up the walls!  We gathered them up using a large fishing net and put them into a cardboard box and left them in the boys tree house in the woods, out of harms way but so Mum could find them.  Unfortunately next morning they were all dead, that was sad but we were pleased they weren’t living under our floorboards anymore.

In the area we were living there are glis glis, edible dormouse, they invade lofts, chew electric wiring and breed like rabbits. You can’t rid your property of them yourself, only registered Pest Controllers are permitted to deal with them.  We only came across a solitary one in all our time there, and that was dead!  It had chewed at electric cables in an outbuilding and electrocuted itself.  Maybe jonab has seen glis glis in his area as they were brought to this country from Europe in the early 1900s by Baron Rothschild who lived in Tring, not far from us.  The Natural History Museum he created in the town was always good for a few hours in the school holidays! 

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Blimey, just one of the pitfalls of country living Lizzie I suppose. Luckily, I've never had them in the house.

However, I did come in from hours in the garden the other day, and the neighbours little three legged cat was curled up on the bed !

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Apparently Heligan Gardens Victorian kitchen serve squirrel cooked in red wine and juniper. I wonder if carries the warning - 'may contain nuts' 

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How many 'tribes?"  of wallabies are there in Britain, I wonder.   I know there were some in Derbyshire many years ago.

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I've just been to ASDA in Arnold, and they were in abundance there !

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19 minutes ago, MargieH said:

How many 'tribes?"  of wallabies are there in Britain, I wonder.   I know there were some in Derbyshire many years ago.

No idea Margie. Roger was the first to spot one of them, hopping across the lawn in the snow, leaving a tell-tale line in the virgin snow, created by the tail,   He was on a phone call and told the other person he’d just seen a kangaroo in his garden.  The chap thought he’d lost his marbles!  When I’d witnessed it I rang Whipsnade Zoo a few miles away and enquired if they’d lost a wallaby, they said they hadn’t. Then we saw two hopping around together.   A friend in the local pub told us he’d been driving by our house one night and was overtaken by a kangaroo, well they ARE similar.  Don’t know what became of them as we moved to Nottingham a few months later.  

I’ve got a photo somewhere, I’ll try to find it. 

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No, not a stork, I heard it was an old shag from Skeggy that brought babies !

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I think that due to the long warm summer, birds have been having a second brood. Just sitting in the garden this afternoon, I saw 6 long tailed tits feeding together, on suet balls and sunflower seeds, then within minutes, a large group of young tits (can I still say that?) fed at the same place. All week, there has been a city pigeon with a solitary youngster on the lawn feeding on dropped seeds.

Long may it continue.

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