Telstales

Tag: wildlife

  • Suck it up Bobs at it again

    It’s just about Autumn time here in the UK….. Days are a little shorter now, temperatures although mild are a little bit down.

    And leaves from deciduous trees are changing into their Autumn clothes and starting to parade their Autumn attire as they drop peacefully and quietly to the ground…Lovely to see and a good reminder that the cooler months are coming soon!

    So, so peaceful to see the Autumn leaves landing on the ground silently….then Bob next door decides “That’s it, you lil buggers…you’re not staying in my garden any longer…even though they’ve only just appeared overnight…..how do I know this…..well Bob has bought himself a ‘gardening vac’…. Just like an indoor hoover only meaner and angrier which compliments Bob in his understanding of nature really!

    ‘Suck-it-up-Bob’ gets to work around his back garden area. Sucking up allsorts of stuff.. Yes..mainly leaves but obviously all small beneficial insects that start to use the leaf litter as their Winter home…. So just like a mincer that grinds chunks of meat or a wood chipper that sorts out branches, so the garden vac angrily and whiningly munches anything it can suck up it and bag it into microscopic pieces.

    I use a rake…it rakes up fallen leaves and I leave them to decompose in the adjacent borders to provide organic matter to the soil and for Winter food for birds foraging in the garden finding grubs to eat when flicking leaves over ( a funny sight to see)

    Still, Bob’s garden is once again in pristine condition…well..for a minute or two as another leaf…ooops…I mean batch of leaves fall to the ground….never mind Bob…it will keep you busy right through to December 😀

    now for a cup-of-T

  • We’re in the cage now

    Been away on a forest holiday. Beautiful lodge, all one could need, sat every day, at different times of the day watching nature close-up doing it’s thing with in an open environment!

    Apart from daily forest walks for health, exercise, well being, switch off and discovering more hidden treasures within each forest area, the rest of each day was sat, soaking up at close hand what nature had to offer.

    That got me thinking….

    When I was a kid, in the 1960’s, I remember being taken to Chester Zoo to see various animals close up that I would never have seen in real life apart from in books, magazines and on TV ( to add… the TV was only available to view in black and white screen which was ok viewing Zebras but pretty much useless getting the full colour effect on most other animals and creatures 🤣) ‘As a kid’, it was amazing to see them.

    Getting a tad older, I remember dragging the family around Knowsley Safari park and no doubt the kids thought the same as me when I was a kid. The safari park to me looking in as an adult, was a step up from the zoo, still caged but with more space to roam, and a little more freedom.

    Yet looking today at those two scenarios, the forms of entrapment doesn’t personally sit with me well at all. Yes, it enables us to see what we wouldn’t normally see on our daily routines and no doubt the care of such animals is paramount with an audience of thousands passing through each day. It is just more that these animals can’t just roam as the would in their homelands.

    And talking about ‘homelands’, our recent Covid encounter which restricted our movements for the fear of being unable to cope and to minimise the spread of the disease, due to the emptiness of some communities I read that wildlife was slowly returning to where they once lived before humans built their communities pushing away such creatures into other spaces and away from newly created buildings. Amazing to think that the creatures that called their place home could actually return there in the absence of humans!

    So, back to the holiday. I was just sat there, enjoying the peacefulness of the forest beyond the lodge boundary, listening to the birds and watching the death defying squirrel leaps and hoping that the deer would just pass by for a closer view, and it struck me that being there, contained within the lodge boundary that we humans were the ones within a cage and the wildlife having the freedom to roam and were out there viewing us as the trapped species!

    How wonderful to think that even with man’s intention that nature has the last laugh at us!

    now for a cup-of-T