Tuesday 19 July 2016

SOME GARDEN WILDLIFE

This young hedgehog has been out and about in our Firs Chase garden over recent nights during this last week. Its home is inside the base of a wooden pallet at the back of our garden.

It's a bit of a challenge trying to find the hedgehog by torchlight before our terrier Ben finds it during his last visit to the garden before bedtime! On Sunday 17th it was on our patio by our back door, where it stopped briefly for these two photos.
It's reassuring to know that any slugs and snails here have got some hungry predators living on our doorstep with resident hedgehogs and song thrushes!
Also feeding at night over the garden on recent nights have been a couple of pipistrelle bats.

Another worthy daily visitor to the garden is the red squirrel who was snapped early evening on Monday 18th raiding the feeder. It stayed for at least twenty minutes tucking its head inside the feeder each time to pull out some nuts. Earlier in the day a jay was seen stealing some nuts a couple or times, having learnt to lift the lid with its head just like the squirrel.

This red squirrel is very recognisable with its very tatty tail. This same individual was also seen early on Saturday morning just outside our bedroom window having woken us up by the sound of it pit-a-patting across our roof! This early morning "call" was one way of getting us to jump out of bed so we could catch a glimpse of it!

A sad sight was this grass-snake found dead in Firs Chase alongside our garden, having been run-over on Monday afternoon. A slow-worm was in the garden compost heap on Sunday.

Birds of interest noted from the garden included a little egret flying over on Monday, five sand martins on passage flew west overhead on Saturday and a goldcrest was calling from the cedar tree the same day.

Thought it worth switching the moth trap on in the Firs Chase garden during the very muggy night on Saturday 16th. Rewarded with 150 macro moth individuals of 33 species by 5am on Sunday.

The most colourful moths were three elephant hawkmoths, one pictured above, a common moth in gardens especially where there is fuchsia growing.

It was nice to find this leopard moth as it's not been noted in the garden before, despite it being quite a widespread moth. Aptly named with its wings covered in lots of black spots.

Other moths noted included 8 least carpets, buff arches, common emerald, scarce silver lines, barred yellow, peppered moth, 6 swallow-tailed, marbled beauty and a silver-Y.

Butterflies over the recent hot weekend have been low in numbers with only passing comma, red admiral and meadow brown while one or two large white and small white have lingered for longer. 

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