NATURALLY THINKING

I looked out of the back bedroom window one morning and thought, yes, it might be warm, but this is definitely November.

Out of the blue, a friend asked me if I had ever heard of tardigrades. This bit of information must have passed me by all my life, because I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

No nature notes from me this month as I’m afraid I have nothing to write. I have, since sometime in November been in Dorchester Hospital then the Yeatman and at present The Old Vicarage Care Home in Leigh. I will be returning home at the end of January.

My liking for starlings is limited to admiration of their wonderful mumerations, and there, I’m afraid, it ends.

By now it looks as though someone is airing pale grey blankets on these hedges. It is a plant that likes chalk or limestone and as the soil round here seems to vary almost yard by yard, this explains why all the hedges are not festooned.

Think back to the summers of not long ago. When the buzzing and hum of insects and the strident sound of grasshoppers and crickets were the background orchestra of a warm, summer’s day.

Although they make an awful mess over the window sills and roses, I’m quite willing to put up with that for the pleasure they bring.

Right on time, on the 4th of the month there were two big clumps of it. I counted seven frogs all trying to do what frogs do at mating times

On one of those very wet days we have had recently, I watched a small white shelled garden snail trailing down the streaming window, heading purposefully towards the bird feeder that is attached there

My hope for the coming year is that the world and its people will calm down and be a more peaceful place.

I’ve never really minded spiders. but this year I seem to have an awful lot of them. ... another thing we can blame on climate change!

I’m sure there are some people who are not pleased to see foxes, probably with good reason, but I am not one of them. Travelling slowly down Rowden Mill Lane one warm day recently, I stopped to watch something small and russet stalking things beyond an open gate.

I found something on my clever computer which told me about the number of phrases in the repertoire of some of our most tuneful birds. A lark has 340, a blackbird more than 100, a song thrush up to 50, likewise a curlew, but the bird that beats the lot is the nightingale that can sing up to 1000!

I think my visiting robin is actually a pair, but it’s impossible to tell males and females apart even though I have tried hard to find any distinguishing feature, though one just seems to behave slightly differently from the other.

In the meantime, I can’t help my mind wandering back to my stay in hospital and the hard working staff that I met there.

Moths think that our lights are lots of artificial moons and find them irresistible

On the morning of the village Jubilee Party, the verges were glowing with tall stems of buttercups.

Out on Genevive one afternoon one day, I stopped to watch an enormous bumblebee that peeped through someone’s picket fence.

Late last autumn, I found my peanut holder on the lawn - again - its contents spilt all over the place. Blow those starlings, I thought, because I always blame starlings for any garden mischief.

I have my own robin. I suppose everyone says this because we all get possessive about the one bird that comes to share our garden with us.

The hogweeds remind me so much of the moor when we lived in Hatherleigh. At that time I become particularly interested in why different insects seemed to prefer different parts of the plant.

Up Holt Lane I spotted a tiny iridescent beetle, one bumble bee and several butterflies. Down Rowden Mill Lane I found about six bumble bees and several little brown butterflies, probably gatekeepers.

The Red Campion too, which had been in bud on the previous occasion that I had been there, were now fully out, sturdy and rich, and misty Bluebells were growing at the foot of the hedges.

I suppose I’ve done a lot of nature watching in my time, and, like so many of us, I haven’t been conscious that was what I was doing.

Good heavens, Christmas is almost upon us again. Since the last few months have gone past in a bit of a haze and I haven’t been able to get out very much, it seems a good time to think back to a heady day in summer.

If a woodpecker gets to the feeder when the starlings are around, they line up on top of the arbour and scream abuse at it but it doesn’t take much notice, just gives them a dirty look now and then.

The recent months have given us a chance to see what the world would be like without the heavy hand of man putting his foot in it, if you’ll pardon my mixed metaphors.

As I expelled the latest half dozen woodlice from the kitchen one morning, I decided it was about time I found out more about the little wretches.

I recently read a controversial article in a newspaper telling me that feeding birds on a feeding station of any sort is not to be recommended.

A visiting friend said, ’You’ve had a badger in here. They’ll eat frogs. Probably too full to eat the fourth leg and those coils, which are its innards, it found too indigestible.’