There was already an urgency in correcting information given on feeding wild hedgehogs in past blog posts dating back to 2007. A fairly recent awareness of metabolic bone disease in hedgehogs was something I felt a strong responsibility to highlight. Then, on the 30th of July 2020 the British hedgehog was officially classified as vulnerable… Read More Update on feeding wild hedgehogs
This post was published by Shirley for shirls gardenwatch in July 2020.
A red squirrel sitting just two metres away puts a whole different spin on social distancing. In a positive way for both numbers of this endgangered native mammal and a gardenwatcher living with someone on the shielded list. A garden supply of peanuts benefited us both back at the beginning of July. Social media is… Read More Red squirrel sightings & sounds
The camera overlooking the wildlife pond has been doing a great job in adding a new perspective to gardenwatching. I love it. Image captures have been varied from birds and hedgehogs drinking, cats trying to catch the resident frogs to blackbirds eating the tadpoles and taking away nesting material from the edges. A huge variety… Read More Big feet of heron walk into pond
It’s all well and good making wishlists for garden plants, but perhaps in this case I should have written this one in LARGE BOLD CAPS and pasted it everywhere from my PC desktop, paper blog diary to the calendar as a next year note. Ahhhhhh. I really wish I had. I truly do. This one… Read More Allium ‘Millenium’, the one for me
It’s becoming empty nest time here. New fledglings are passing through the garden daily. Some return like the Greenfinch above, some we only get fleeting moments of as they land en masse and take flight again instantly. Starlings bounced through yesterday, quietly for a change. This couldn’t have been their first day out of the… Read More Greenfinch fledglings, who’s next?
Damp mornings are perhaps not the best ones to go out with a camera but yesterday the garden didn’t disappoint revealing another new wildlife sighting. Refreshed foliage, flowers with raindrops and a soggy bee resting on a flower were to be expected, The final moult stage of a seven spot ladybird was definitely not. Research… Read More Soggy bee on allium for GBBD
It has been fantastic to watch video captures of night time and early morning garden visitors. There have been quite a few surprises and the image above is not one I ever expected to see. The sounds coming from the hedgehog feeding station camera weren’t either and they stayed with me for most of the… Read More Fox cub disturbs hedgehog feeding
Clearly an expert in this field I am not. Truth be told, yesterday evening I felt a proper numpty (common Scottish word for feeling foolish). Photo uploads revealed that I had been sitting with binoculars watching empty damselfly larval skins – waiting for something to happen. Fortunately I took enough photos to share my new… Read More Spotting emerging damselflies
Not a garden sighting as yet, but a first sighting non-the-less. Delighted! I knew where there was a chance of seeing this bird, now that it is being seen moving north and into my area of Scotland. I’ve sat by the observation window at Loch of the Lowes with camera and coffee just waiting for… Read More The wait is over, a Nuthatch!