The night visitors

Most days, before gardening, I take a look round the garden to see what’s happening and what needs doing – and occasionally find surprises. 

The weather has been wet most days over the past month; there have been a few dry interludes, but the soil is pretty soggy and sticky, making digging or clearing weeds difficult, and there has been limited opportunity for getting the bigger jobs, such as pruning the big apple tree, done.  I’ve managed a little clearing of old vegetation, some light cutting back and odd other jobs, but the ones that need a full good day outside are still pending.  While checking round the garden the other day, however, I spotted a couple of interesting, not to mention puzzling, things – we have had some nocturnal goings-on that I wasn’t aware of.

First, I checked over the windfall apples left out on the old table by the dining-room window, to remove the totally rotten ones and put a couple of sound(ish) fruit on the patio to give the birds a variety of places to feed.  Among the apples were three or four softish oval objects – owl pellets, I assume.  We have tawny owls around here – a female was calling nearby last night – but I didn’t realise that they visit so close to the house.  Owls regurgitate pellets containing the inedible bits of their prey; I broke one open and could see beetle wing-cases in there.  Fascinating.

Owl pellets

Then I took a look at the path by the long hedge. Not much needs attention there at the moment, given that the hedge was trimmed in the autumn and the prunings dropped on to a cardboard base to suppress weeds, so I hadn’t been along it for a while, but halfway down there’s a self-seeded hellebore which I tolerate, and the old leaves needed to be cut off.  The path, still well covered by bits of fresh evergreen conifer, is overhung by various shrubs and is quite secluded, so it’s not unusual to find evidence of wildlife having been there; foxes seem to like to take prey in there, and I’ve found remains of pheasants left behind by them.  I noticed clusters of droppings on the path – just a couple at first, and then on closer inspection quite a few; lots of roundish, fairly fresh droppings, each about pea-size.  My initial thought was that they had been left by a rat (an inevitable part of living in the country), but the quantity and size made that quite impossible – these had been left by a much larger animal.  Even a rabbit couldn’t have generated those.  After much cogitation, I can only think that we’ve had a deer in the garden.  There are roe and fallow deer in the vicinity, but I can’t imagine that they would come into a domestic garden – there’s plenty of secluded grazing for them in the fields and woods around here.  A close neighbour has had a muntjac in his garden, eating windfall apples in broad daylight, and that seems much more likely.  There’s no sign of it (or them) having eaten any plants (that I’ve noticed), so I don’t mind; I’m just rather surprised that it would venture so close to a house for no obvious reason!  I assume it visited at dusk or very early morning as I haven’t seen it.  A fox appears to have found it interesting too; there was fox poo beside one of the droppings piles, where the fox ‘made his mark’ to assert it was his territory.

Nocturnal droppings - deer (top), fox (bottom)

There are obviously several goings-on in the garden that are not apparent to the owners!