Foxes, Badgers, Rats and Rabbits

[GarethM]

20 minutes ago, Billhook said:

You are right Mick and they need my perfect solution which is to place an infertility drug into all artificial sugar.  I think you must advertise that it is in there.  This might clear a few beds in the NHS as I would bet that obesity would be the cause of half the patients from heart disease to hips and knees, to diabetes

Rock out with yer out, just make sure you have a diet coke break afterwards.

[Billhook]

On 19/02/2023 at 22:31, GarethM said:

Rock out with yer out, just make sure you have a diet coke break afterwards.

I actually believe that you do not need to put a drug in sugar, just say that you have!

[GarethM]

Bit it's a condition tho, it's a decidedly fast pie arm.

[Billhook]

I still have not seen a fox or a rat on the farm, a very few baby rabbits are appearing but hardly any adults.  Badger signs are everywhere but I have not encountered a badger on the road at night as I would normally.  Squirrels everywhere and good variety of bird life but another depletion is queen wasps.  Normally my conservatory where I bring in the wood for the stove would be buzzing with them as they wake with the warmth.  Do you think that the very cold spell we had did for them?

[nepia]

Hibernating insects have all but disappeared this season; I fear for this summer.  Only a handful of queen wasps have I encountered anywhere and only two butterflies in my log cages - I usually find more than a dozen through the winter which get carefully relocated to the middle of another cage I won't be opening until next autumn

[Billhook]

40 minutes ago, nepia said:

Hibernating insects have all but disappeared this season; I fear for this summer.  Only a handful of queen wasps have I encountered anywhere and only two butterflies in my log cages - I usually find more than a dozen through the winter which get carefully relocated to the middle of another cage I won't be opening until next autumn

It did not seem a very prolonged period of cold, compared say to 1963, but perhaps species of all sorts have become softer with the series of mild Winters. Do you think that the lack of rabbits has done for the foxes?

 My Pipistrelle bats seem to be doing ok in the log cabin, nestling between the full scribe Poplar logs.  Little droppings everywhere !

[nepia]

I wouldn't know about rabbits and foxes but in rural areas they must form a substantial part of the foxes' diet. So a drop in bunny population presumably affects the foxes.

We had to have the full gamut of bat surveys last year as we put in for planning for an extension to a timber framed and clad house.  Soprano Pipistrelles summer roosting in the current cladding, though now gone, and four other species detected in or over the garden one summer's evening although one of those (Natterer's) was just flying over.

I don't get peoples' aversion to them:  I'm pleased to have them - saw two hunting in the garden one afternoon last week - and will be making provision for them both when the house is re-clad and on the new build Sussex barn.  I suspect that there will be sufficient gaps in the boards there without my intervention but if not boxes will surely be going up, along with bird boxes and proforma swallow's nests in the barn

[GarethM]

Don't think anyone has an adversion to bats, it's more the council's heaping on yet more surveys and cost before they'll even look at an application.

 

Last bat survey cost around 1300 plus the 600 for the basic survey. Always written in such vague noncommittal terms even when they aren't living in the building.

 

I would agree with having bat roosts built into one end gables and maybe bird nest boxes built into the brickwork at a so many per m providing it's say 3m above ground.

[sime42]

1 hour ago, Billhook said:

It did not seem a very prolonged period of cold, compared say to 1963, but perhaps species of all sorts have become softer with the series of mild Winters. Do you think that the lack of rabbits has done for the foxes?

 My Pipistrelle bats seem to be doing ok in the log cabin, nestling between the full scribe Poplar logs.  Little droppings everywhere !

 

I think the problem may be to do with hibernation,/dormancy rather than the actual cold. A lot of things, plants, insects, birds, animals aren't going into hibernation earlier enough, or at all, due to our generally warmer autumns and winters now. If proper cold weather does finally come it nails things that aren't hibernating as they should. The natural world is confused, it can't keep up with the pace of change.

 

 

 

[Billhook]

Just sitting on a bench at the log cabin by the lake in the first sunshine for a while and the air is full of buzzing insects, flies and bumblebees in spite of Attenborough’s claims that they are depleted.  
A small fish, possibly a silver Rudd suddenly surfaced and went about twenty feet across the surface like a jet skier and went completely out of the water and on to the bank.  It then flipped about and flipped itself back in the lake.  Never seen that before.  Possibly escaping a Pike?