Wandering wildlife

The Met Office keeps telling us that it’s going to rain (mostly on a Tuesday for some reason), but then it doesn’t.  There has been one day with a little drizzle and a few minutes of actual rain, but that’s it.  The garden is parched and, water shortage or not, I’ve been occasionally watering a few plants (mostly in the vegetable plot) as well as the pots.  The lawn is brown – we’ve only cut it twice this year so far.  There might be rain in the coming week; it will be welcome if so.

The ground is hard and solid, which makes weeding difficult; it’s also challenging for wildlife, which can’t find worms and slugs and can’t dig down to reach them.  August is always a quiet period for birds anyway – they seem to keep a low profile while they moult and recover from having been busy with breeding – and in the heat we were only seeing a few sparrows and tits coming for an early morning drink (apart from the everpresent woodpigeons).  But the partridges have been brought in for shooting (a pointless business as far as I’m concerned) and are flocking around; a group of twelve wandered through the garden one day.

Wandering partridges

After one especially hot (for us) day – nearly 33C (about 100F) in the shade – the birds suddenly reappeared.  Robins are getting their new feathers, and we’ve had a warbler and a green woodpecker in the garden.  More unusually, a duck has been seen wandering the village with her five ducklings (there seem to be a lot of them down in the valley, where there are a few artificial lakes, and loud bangs in the mornings suggest that they’re being shot, probably for someone’s fun).  The ducklings invaded a conservatory in the village, which housed a collection of cacti whose owner had waited for years to see flowering, and the ducklings ate the flowers, to her annoyance!

We also have a couple of leucistic (whitish plumage) juvenile sparrows; unlike albinos, they seem fine and flock with the other sparrows.

The butterflies are fewer now that the oregano has finished flowering (and mostly been cut back before it can self-seed), but the buddleja is keeping some of them busy, including at least seven hummingbird hawkmoths, which are having a really good summer.  A few roe deer were seen in the field behind the garden one day – they don’t usually come so close to the village in daylight; I wonder if it was the heat that brought them there?

The dry soil has made us worry about our hedgehog who was seen a few weeks ago out in daylight, possibly to feed herself up to give milk for her hoglets.  We’ve bought some dry cat food and have put a little out in two places in the garden, along with saucers of water, every evening.  The food gets eaten, and we have wondered if we’re inadvertently feeding the neighbours’ cats; last evening I sat out in the summerhouse until well after dark, and can confirm that a little hedgehoggy shape trotted by and ate and drank to its little heart’s content.