I’ve been fascinated by Anne Treneman’s continuing tales in The Times of the lovey-dovey visitors to the yew tree outside her husband’s ‘man cave’ window. I can still recall, only too creepily, my own similar story. Back at the old house, before I moved north to Cumbria, I too had a pair of amorous collared…
Category: Otters & birds
Killer Hamsters return in a hail of ‘fire and furry’
Well it looks as though the KN-08 waving has escalated after all, what with the most unlikely set of identical twins since Danny de Vito and Arnie Shwarzenegger taking their Killer Hamster act on tour for the summer. Killer Hamster Un brags his newfound ability to nuke the US — although let’s face it, that’s…
Secretary of State says ‘maybe’
Given that nuclear war hasn’t yet commenced, despite a further attempt to launch Mr Kim’s deadly KN-08, and that Orange Bloke just generally being one, this week I’m back focusing on Strawberry How. Well, if we’re not about to be nuked any time soon, may as well concern ourselves with pasture-pillaging property magnates closer to home. And there…
Images from a warming climate: Interview with photographer Ashley Cooper
If you ever doubted it, climate change and global warming are here. Ashley Cooper travelled the world with his camera to record the devastation for his stunning coffee table book ‘Images from a Warming Climate’ and it makes sobering viewing.
No newts is bad news… and other thongs… er, things
Campaign groups, I learned last week, have taken to planting colonies of great crested newts (Triturus cristatus) on proposed development sites, in a bid to scupper the likes of Story Homes and Persimmon. The diminutive newt, you see, has ‘the power to halt bulldozers in their muddy tracks’. Or so said Conservative peer Lord Borwick…
Footpaths and tea pods
First they came for the birds. Then the otters. Now, it would seem, they’re after our footpaths. Hackles were high again last weekend, up at Strawberry How, as dog walkers discovered their way barred – on a path, across the field from Tom Rudd Beck, which some of them have been wandering for nigh on forty years. I risk…
Bugs and bunnies
First, the good news. The top soil is off. All that slurry, grass and cow poo gone. It’s raining (or was when I began writing this last night!). And, finally, the flies have left us. Not even the brown sticky stuff is the spectator sport it once was. Trouble is, the bugs may have departed…
Birds and bugs
Just when we thought there might be a twinkling of renewed engagement with the community, in the wake of the still ongoing otter debacle, the ongoing hedgerow debacle kicks in again. Back on 17 May, we were led to understand that the final section of hedgerow, along the roadside perimeter of the proposed ‘Strawberry Grange’, would be given a stay…
An otter’s tale
Otters. How many in this gem town were aware that, just a stick’s throw from their regular dog-walk along the banks of the Tom Rudd Beck, otters were building their homes, rearing families? Few, I suspect. Except those whose ducks or chickens have been snaffled and ponds raided, and those with a professional interest in wildlife and their habitats. And,…
The birds have flown
Another morning another phone call. ‘I’m outside. The police have just arrived. They’re in the field.’ ‘They’, of course, being the now familiar contingent of orange hi-vis and rigger boots. And they’re here, apparently, to rip the rest of the hedgerow out, interrupted in their task by the arrival of we pesky campaigners. While the developer’s representatives…
Blue nets and blackbirds
It was early April when they started ripping out hedgerow, a Wednesday wind whipping down the lane like so many razor blades, nipping any hoped-for spring literally in the bud. Not the sort of day you want to be out there – woolly hat and furry boots notwithstanding – but out there we were. ‘You better come now,’ said Sara. ‘They’re ripping out the hedgerow’….
Hackette on the How 