Dear Steve,
If I were in a position to be able to photograph the nest of a harvest mouse, I’d eagerly grab it, obviously without disturbing the occupants. The nests are quite a feat of engineering. I certainly wouldn’t do what Gilbert did, take one indoors and roll it around on the table, apparently with the babies still inside. Attitudes to such things were very different in his day.
Gilbert’s mentioning mice reminded about the time we were getting ready to move to Gosport. We had stored some old rugs in the shed, and as we moved them, hundreds of seeds fell out. We undid the rug, and it had been a mouse home. What struck me wasn’t the nest itself so much as the sheer effort that had gone into gathering the food.
Misty, our cat, very occasionally brings a mouse into the house to play with. We try to get it away from her; we have a technique now that is moderately successful in rescuing the mouse. When the mouse gets away from us, we end up putting a humane trap down. We use peanut butter as the bait. It smells and draws the mice in. Sometimes it can take a couple of days, but usually I’ll pick the trap up to see a mouse staring at me. We make a point of letting it go well away from the house.
I was out for a walk this morning. As usual, I swung past the Cockle Ponds. I was chuffed as monkeys to see the seaweed clearing machine in operation. I’ve been waiting to see that for a long time.
There are a lot of jellyfish in the ponds at the moment. I couldn’t help noticing that some of them looked a bit different to others. Their reproductive organs looked swollen and full. Initially, I was concerned as I thought they may be sick. But then, I realised that they were full of eggs, or possibly early-stage larvae. Either way, I’ll keep an eye on them.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a swallow or a swift. I hope they are still about. Gilbert was writing about early beliefs that when they disappeared in the wintertime, they were hibernating underwater. People were reporting that Swallows were appearing in Senegal, Africa, but there was no way of saying that the birds seen there had come from the UK. Today, tiny tracking devices can show astonishing journeys across continents, but in Gilbert’s day such claims must have sounded impossible.
All the Best
Bill
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