Midnight Rendezvous....

Hedgehog Rescue....

Around six weeks ago, we spotted a small hedgehog wandering around on the lawn in the middle of the afternoon.  It's a bad sign seeing any hedgehog out during daylight hours, and particularly autumn juveniles, so we picked him up and took him inside in a cardboard box. The wife fed him some cooked chicken while I set about building a hospital enclosure in the garden from some old materials and wire mesh, basically anything we had lying around.

We kept him confined in a remote area of the garden down the side of one of the sheds, made a nest box from an upturned plastic container with an entrance arch cut into one corner, and stuffed it with shredded paper.  

He took to his new territory immediately and soon lost his fear of us, even allowing the wife to stroke his nose without him curling up into a ball !

We fed him on tinned cat food, mashed-up boiled eggs, pet shop hedgehog food* and assorted kitchen scraps, and after four or five days he'd returned to more nocturnal habits.

Unusual visitor to the garden...

I spotted this butterfly in the garden early this morning.  I went inside to grab the camera thinking he'd probably fly away before I returned, but he was still there.

Maybe he'd just emerged and was still half-asleep, because he allowed me to get very close and to even snap off the leaf on which he was sitting, so I could get a better shot.

Click on the photos for larger images....

I've never seen a butterfly like this before in my life, and so I thought it must be quite rare.  However, according to authoritative references on the web, it's a male 'Orange Tip' and they're quite common & widespread throughout the UK....

Mole encounter....

My wife called to me from the garden earlier today - from the kitchen window, she'd seen a magpie pecking at the grass out the back.  Nothing unusual about that, but it had suddenly jumped back and then turned and flown away, so she'd been out to investigate.

When I went outside, I could see the ground heaving slightly in the middle of our back lawn, so I grabbed the camera and a stool and sat close to it.  After around five minutes, the earth broke but the mole didn't seem to emerge.

the very small molehill

The local wildlife...

As I've mentioned before, we live in a semi-rural location adjacent to farmland and a local woodland nature reserve, and we're lucky enough to see some of the local wildlife. 

So I thought I'd share some of our photos from the past year...

Hedgehogs
We've a family of hedgehogs nearby, that we used to think might live in a pile of old tree-cuttings just the other side of our hedge, but when we cleared the land (very carefully !) they were nowhere to be found.  They can be seen out and about quite often at dusk and beyond, and one night in August we were fortunate to see a pair of them together in our garden.

Maybe it's some strange mating ritual but, although I know nothing about hedgehogs, it seemed rather late in the year for them to be breeding.   They didn't seem to mind our presence or the flash photography at all, although we were very close.