Posts Tagged ‘frogs’
Quail diary – 39. Wild things (you make my heart sing)
Quail - fascinated by the flipflops. They'll all submit to being stroked now if they think I've got some mealie worms. Egg count - 248
A gentle hum pervades the neighbourhood. It’s June, and hot, and the borders are heavy with blossom and bees. Bantam Neighbour has taken up apiary. Outside the pristine new wooden hive at the bottom of her garden, little squaredances are taking place as the insects check for strangers. In her pond, half the size of a puddle, black blobs wriggle among the weed. Soon they will sprout legs and creep up on to land. I think they are toads. They are certainly much bigger than the tadpoles being watched over (and not eaten) by the newts in Little Brother’s rather larger water feature out beyond the commuter belt. The London tadpoles have only the goldfish for company, and the water snails twisting helplessly on the surface just out of the cats’ reach. The heron hasn’t found them yet, though it has cleaned out the pond up the road.
The stagbeetles have hatched too and are bumbling round, falling into plant pots and crashing into windows as they do every summer. They are supposed to be rare, but they seem to be doing just fine here, among the crumbling Victorian terraces that survived the Blitz. Their bulk and lack of steering can be quite unnerving at dusk. The other evening a bat joined the aerial acrobatics. A bat, in SE12? And there’s a woodpecker somewhere in the row of pollution-encrusted plane trees between our gardens and the ones behind, in the next street.
In fact, wildlife is flourishing in south-east London, and the quail (still laying with gusto in their homemade run) and I feel quite a buzz until Neighbor Nancy emails from the US to say she has no foxes – just hawks, eagles, raccoons, owls and bears in her bit of Pennsylvania; she has a hard time keeping the deer out of her sunflower patch, and do my quail eat ticks … Ticks? Bears..??
Kittens at the screen door
Suddenly, like turning over a stone, a hidden world opens. Out there on the wide, world web, in suburban gardens from Sydney to New Jersey, townies are getting stuck in – re-engaging with the seasons and the wild things around them, hooked from the day they tasted their first windowbox tomato. Along the way, some of us find raccoons and bears, some possums, and some of us just rats and cockney sparrows.
It is amazing how many of us there are out there, even in tiny crowded Britain, growing our own vegetables in small spaces, raising eggs, mulching our kitchen waste into reuseable compost, and mending things: bean-sprouts in Cheshire; compostwoman in Hertfordshire; colour it green (- loved the camomile “lawn”- ); and many, many more, from big hitters like self-sufficientish leading free-food foraging parties round Bristol, right down to small potatoes like me, blogging what one kind reader described as a “quail soap opera, by a London downsizer”.
Yes, apparently there’s even a word for us: downsizers. And we are not all knitting our own water supply.
Quail diary – 32. Sex and frogs and rock’n’roll
Little Brother, who last year swopped north London for 300ft of rural idyll (and a masters degree in lawn mowing), emailed to say they now have bunnies back and front. New babies have been spotted playing on the driveway – the size, shape and colour of small rocks. “Very disconcerting when they suddenly get up and hop away. Very sweet when they chase each other though. We’re not very good at being country folk. I suspect the neighbours would have had their shotguns out by now.
“Did I tell you we have newts? Common newts and great crested newts, and both in huge numbers. Soon to be even greater numbers, it seems, as I now know that newts eat frog spawn. About a month ago our pond was a seething cauldron of unfettered lust as well over a dozen frogs indulged in the mother and father of all gang-bangs. One hapless female had three of them firmly clamped to her. No wonder she made an unholy screeching noise whenever one of us approached. She was probably worried we might try to climb on.
“Anyway, at the time we were vaguely aware of two or three newts who seemed to be quietly watching the activity. The frogs duly spawned all over the place and we ooh-ed and aah-ed over the freshly laid eggs. The newts meanwhile, settled down for lunch, presumably followed by a quiet afternoon shag, as shortly thereafter we noticed two strings of eggs that remained strangely unchewed. A week ago they hatched into tadpoles, except that the newts, who now seem to have invited their friends, neighbours and relatives over, don’t touch them. We have at least a dozen fully grown newts and hundreds of tadpoles. Used the hammock again yesterday, glass of white wine in hand. Life’s not so bad.”
Oh, do get back to your digging, staking, raking, pruning, fencing and mending …
Quail diary 