Category Archives: Wildlife and Nature

by | January 23, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (11)

Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….

He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….

I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….

Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..

The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..

He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……

And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….

After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..

He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..

If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………

 

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by | January 11, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (10)

The garden behind our house is rather peculiar in the sense that halfway between the house and the end of the garden there is a drop of some twelve or fifteen feet down to a lawn and a few trees. The soil below this little cliff is alluvial and black and of a stunning quality just as if it had been brought there from elsewhere

Personally, I have always felt that during one of the Ice Ages some 10,000-12,000 years ago, a raging torrent brought ice cold water from underneath a glacier and carried it away to what would one day become the River Trent. As it did so, it left us our mini-cliff , and, a hundred yards beyond our fence, a much smaller, non-raging not-a-torrent, called the Daybrook.

I haven’t any pictures of this cliff, but I do have one or two which show clearly the almost sheer drop down to the lawn. Here’s the first….

The white lines in the trees (on the right) are the window ledges of the bedrooms of the houses in the street below.

In the next photograph, you can see the garage of a house in the street below…….

Because of this fifteen foot cliff,  my friend Widdle was faced with a slight problem in that he had to find a viable route up to the patio where he would be given one or two of the free sausages he enjoyed so much.

There were perhaps three main routes up to the patio. The first and most difficult was to come round the back of next door’s garage where he had to negotiate a path only six inches wide with a drop of some fifteen feet to the ground below. The drop is very obvious in this picture where Widdle turns silently from his precarious perch to the safer surface of the patio, the location of our garage before we had it demolished……..

Did you notice that Wisddle’s paw is perched in mid-air, twelve feet or more above next door’s lawn ?

Alternatively Widdle could come across the lawn and then walk up the flight of steps which I myself had made when we first moved into our house some forty years previously. First of all, he might sit and wait on the luxuriant sward of a particularly damp lawn………

Or, he might just explore the grass, looking for anything interesting that he could take away with him…..

After checking the lawn thoroughly for discarded food, Widdle beats a determined path to the bottom of the steps…..

Once Widdle has made his way up to the top of the thirty nine steps, he can step out into Sausageland…..

Where, with a little bit of luck, somebody would be sitting waiting for him, sausage in hand……

He might even meet an old friend, Yin Yang, the Killer Kat…..

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by | December 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

What would you do ? (19) The Solution

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys, and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy “Boys’ World”, and this was mainly for the front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

And here’s that yellow box enlarged:

And the correct solution was now relegated to page 9 of the comic. Here it is:

And the text, a bit blurry for my taste at this point, reads:

“This was the exact situation Buffalo Bill faced on one of his many buffalo hunts. He saved himself by shooting the leading buffalo, knowing that the rest of the herd would avoid the fallen animal. He then crouched down behind the carcass, using it as a shield, and escaped without a scratch from the stampede passing him on either side. “

 

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by | December 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

What would you do ? (19) The Puzzle

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy “Boys’ World”, and this was mainly for the front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

The yellow box sets the scene, and the task is for you to solve the situation. Perhaps you might like to write your idea in the “Comments” section.

Here’s the yellow box enlarged:

So…..it’s one “Dilly of a pickle”.  A thousand hooves thunder across the American plains as the bison all set off in a frightening stampede. In their path stands Buffalo Bill, an All-American Hero, but  armed at this moment with only a single shot rifle. His revolver will be useless and against these terrified huge animals, his one bullet will not kill the herd.

What can  he do??

Incidentally, Buffalo Bill and his famous Wild West Show came to Nottingham, accompanied by riders of many different nationalities, such as Lakota and Cheyenne Native Americans, Argentinian gauchos, Russian Cossacks, Mongols and Turks, all of them expert riders. They camped on grassland between the southern bank of the Trent and the houses of that part of West Bridgford, but I have been unable to discover where they performed.

After one Saturday matinée, a stand holding 800 people collapsed, but the only damage was one broken ankle, a very lucky escape for everybody.

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by | December 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Some slides of Scotland, where we used to go camping, in the mid-1970s (3)

As a young man, I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of Scotland in a clockwise direction, beginning in Glasgow, and then northwards to the top left hand corner of  Scotland at Cape Wrath. After that we headed eastwards for John O’Groats and then returned home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England.

I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer camera and was then able to bore people silly on wet Tuesday evenings. I recently found all my slides, packed away in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. When I got round to doing it, one or two of the slides also suffered during the conversion process into digital images, usually acquiring either an overall blue or purple cast, or, on other occasions, with the image being much darker than it had originally been. Even so. many of these fifty year old slides had a certain value of their own.

These particular ones show the north east of Scotland. This is an area which tends to lack particularly high mountains. Instead, the entire, rather flattish landscape rests on seacliffs of sandstone, but a sandstone which is so compressed that in days of yore it was used for paving slabs. This slide shows what occasionally happens when a bit of the cliff breaks off and forms a column of rock called a “stack”……

This shows you the sharply layered sandstone at the top of the cliff. The paving slabs come almost ready packed! At some places near Scrabster, the slabs are just two wide and there is a 300-400 foot drop either side. An excellent place to test your courage, or alternatively, to cure your constipation……..

Just south of John O’Groats are Duncansby Stacks which are extremely spectacular. This picture, though, shows the dangers of slides, which frequently tend to produce a second rate image of an outstanding natural scene, much more often than modern cameras do…..

Overall, mountains in this region are few and far between. They stand on the familiar landscape of thousands and thousands of tiny pools called “lochans”, where the famous Scottish “midges” breed in their billions. And they bite. Again and again and again……

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On one occasion, I counted more than fifty bites on each hand, although this was on the west coast, near RSPB Handa. Anyway, here is a typical scene in  the very far north…..

These mountains, with the exception perhaps of the two named after the famous racehorses, Foinaven and Arkle, are not particularly famous, and it is the overall look of the countryside which is striking rather than how spectacular the mountains are.

Here’s the reason that Foinaven became famous, in the 1967 Grand National, held at Aintree in Liverpool…….

 

Here’s another sea stack, around 300-400 feet high, which looks as if it is still joined to the main cliff………

This stretch of cliff is not particularly striking unless you recognise, perhaps, how similar it is to “Hell’s Mouth” in Cornwall……

This steep sided passageway into the cliff is near Duncansby Head stacks. I’m pretty sure that it is called a “geo” . This one is just over 400 feet deep with a width considerably less than that……

This is taken in the same immediate area and helps provide nesting places for thousands and thousands of nesting seabirds when the season is right…………….

And here is a much better shot of the Duncansby Stacks……..

We went down to the bottom of the cliffs and then went a walk along the rocky shore. When we noticed that the tide was coming in, it was only then that I remembered that the tides here, between mainland Scotland and the Orkney Islands, are among the fastest in the world, along with Newfoundland in Canada. I won’t ever forget that rather frightened scramble we carried out, from rock to rock, and finally to the path back up the cliff to safety.

 

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by | December 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (9)

Let’s remind ourselves of a typical urban fox. Let’s call him “Widdle”.

In December 2009, he arrives at the corner of our blizzard swept lawn:

The weather is unusually cold for Nottingham, and he is rather cold. And, as always, he is rather hungry. Lucky then, that he knows exactly where to go.

He makes his way up to what used to be the base of an old garage which was burnt down years ago in an insurance job fire, and prison time was served, I believe, (not by me, I hasten to add, nor indeed, by Widdle). He doesn’t have to shout out his order, but if he could shout it out, it would be “Sausages all round!” .

And then he settles down in the snow to sit quietly and wait for his meal. Just look at that fantastic fur coat. For winter, it is at its thickest. A luxuriant, magnificent warm fur coat:

Just occasionally, he changes his position so that nothing freezes solid:

He waits patiently until he catches that distinctive smell…….

“What’s that smell?

That meaty smell ?

That’s the smell of…..sausages!!!”

 

The best cheap sausages we could find. They came from the Iceland supermarket chain and contained 42% meat with no ash included, as many foods for dogs seemed to have. Widdle took what he could carry in his mouth, and set off back to his den to take it to his family:

And he ate one, and then he took another three back to his den, for Mrs Widdle and the rest of the family. Naturally, in such weather, Widdle left a lot of tracks. Mixed in may be a few domestic cat (felis catus) but I would be amazed if there were any dog prints:

Here’s an individual print. The claws are visible which excludes domestic cat:

Here’s another one:

The following day, the weather cleared up markedly and most of the snow quickly melted. Even so, I was more than a little surprised to see a butterfly sunning itself in the rays of the winter sun:

And even closer up, it is really beautiful. It’s a Small Tortoiseshell:

It looks as if it is injured but I don’t think it is. It seems merely to have twisted itself a little to make sure that it gets the maximum amount of sun.

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by | October 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (4)

Before the sudden advent of the huge electric amusement machines around 1900, exotic animals were a firm favourite of the Goose Fair hordes………

The big problem, of course, was the fact that, in the desire to exhibit the most unusual animals, the owners of the animals would often end up by going to an animal market and buying a creature that they themselves could not identify. So sit back and enjoy my own attempts to work out what the unknown animal really was………

Let’s start with……..

“Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. These were shown in Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” in 1898 as a “Group of Wild and ferocious Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. Alongside them was a group of Baby Lions”.

There are wolves in Ethiopia, but they are red, so much so that they are also called “the Simien fox or Simien jackal or horse jackal”. Intriguingly, at this time, the name “Tiger-Wolf” was the accepted shortened form of “Tasmanian Tiger-Wolf”. This phrase was used to refer to the Thylacine, an unbelievably rare Australian animal to turn up in a fair in Nottingham. I really do wonder what these animals were!

A slightly less colourful one:

I think you’re getting the idea…..

Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” also had “Blonko Bill, King of the Lion Tamers” working for them.” I have been unable to trace the meaning of “blonko”, although if ever a word sounded like Australian slang, this is it! The internet was no help. One site said it meant “kind, entertaining, handsome”, another said it meant “fat, fat, fat”.

In 1899, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster listing all of their animals, including the “Great Pongo Baboon, or Hairy Wild Man”. Intriguingly, “Pongo” is the scientific name for the orangutan, thought to be a close relative of Bigfoot, hence the “Hairy Wild Man” epithet:

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Another strange sounding animal on the Bostock & Wombwell poster was the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon” although, ironically, it is very simple. The poster is referring to the Hamadryas Baboon from the Horn of Africa and the southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula. You can just see the side of his bright scarlet posterior……

The same owners had a “Chiropottamus, or Vlacko-Vark” which is merely a sort of wild pig. It may be the Red River Hog, “a wild member of the pig family living in the Guinean and Congolian forests. Here’s the old Brooke Bond tea card from the “Wild Animals of Africa” collection….

Alternatively, it may be the warthog which is the “vlakvark” in Afrikaans…..

A “Leucoryx Antelope” sounds a very strange beast but it is also called the “Gemsboc” on the poster. And the “Gemsboc is the gemsbok, gemsbuck or South African oryx, native to the arid regions of Southern Africa, such as the Kalahari Desert. It is a very beautiful animal….

The “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse” is a lot easier, because we have all seen this strange word. Not totally unexpectedly, the Brindled Gnu is the blue wildebeest, also called the common wildebeest, the white-bearded wildebeest or the white-bearded gnu. It is one of the two species of wildebeest…..

The Bostock & Wombwell poster advertises a “White Silken Sacred Yak” which would have been a pure white yak. Nowadays, some 5% of the herds are white. They are regarded as an extremely auspicious animal since white represents light, a personification of the illumination of wisdom and the universal Buddha……

Some animals are very easy to sort out.

A “Puma or Silver Lion” was presumably a North American mountain lion, cougar or puma. Here’s a lovely picture of one of the first ever mountain lions to be found in North Dakota…..

A “Jaguar or Clouded Tiger” is nowadays called a “jaguar” or a “clouded leopard”……

A “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” is most probably the North American bison…..

A “Monstre Nennock” sounds incomprehensible, but the alternate names give it away, with “Arctic Sea Bear” making it the polar bear. It would be nice to know what a nennock is, though. Incidentally, I’ve just turned my slides into digital photographs, photoshopped them to make them a little lighter and got rid of the hairs and general dirt. So, here is a nennock or two at Basel Zoo in Switzerland in 1979….

Two final animals though, are most intriguing. Just what were the “Hideous Aswaila”, or “Himalayan Monsters”? Were they a family group of yetis? I bet they were, but the people of the time did not know what yeti was…….

And last of all. What on earth were “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”? Were they a family group of Bigfoots? Using their famous “Samurai Chatter” to pass comment about Nottingham and its inhabitants? Here’s a youtube video, and if you move swiftly to 4 minutes exactly, you’ll hear what “Samurai Chatter” is. At 4.40, you can hear the Bigfoot walking around the cabin. It’s really scary!

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by | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes.  On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

 

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by | July 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (7) or, more accurately, the Rise of the Urban Fox

After the First World War, London began to expand as a city, particularly to the north and west. What had been farmland was now purchased and then built on. Many, but not all, of the woods were chopped down, the trees and branches were burnt, and new houses were then built on the site. The people who lived in those new houses for the most part worked in the centre of London and new words had to be invented to describe what they had to do in order to get to work. They took the train. Suburban, local trains, whose only purpose was to carry people who were now being called “commuters”, on their way to work. What they did was called “commuting”, and it obviously paid them to do it. Their salaries must have been high enough to justify adding a couple of hours to every one of their working days.

The very best paid commuters lived in what were called the “leafy suburbs”. They could even afford to buy a detached house near the golf course, with four or five bedrooms and a large private garden all the way round it:

In some cases, the leaves of the new leafy suburbs were attached to trees which pre-dated the building of the new houses. Builders with a bit of vision had soon realised that they could save themselves a lot of cash, and finish up with a much better product if they kept as many of the mature trees as possible. All they had to do was to build the houses between them and to do the same with the streets, if they could. Look at the age of these trees:

That slight change in approach by the builders had quite an effect on the suburbs created at the ends of the hundreds of the suburban railway lines which linked the centre of London with the houses where their office workers lived. And, to their credit, instead of just moving on elsewhere, the creatures which had lived in the woods before the developers arrived, made enormous efforts to stay in their homes and not be forced out.

In some cases badger setts survived the building process and remained unnoticed behind the park-keeper’s new storage sheds.

Hedgehogs hunted slugs and snails in rockeries and vegetable gardens, just as they had in spinneys, copses and woods.

Mice, shrews and rats went unnoticed, as they always have. But above all, one animal benefited enormously. That was “vulpes vulpes”, better known as the fox. They carried on their lives pretty much as they always had done, taking little or no notice of human beings and their machines. If anything, life was considerably easier, and food more plentiful now that they lived in a city suburb, which was always a few degrees warmer than the bleak countryside. And very soon London had in excess of 10,000 urban foxes. And many other cities experienced the same process. Bristol. Birmingham. Sheffield. And Nottingham, the home of the most famous fox of them all…….

Here’s another of them, hurrying to the fish and chip shop to see if anybody couldn’t eat all of what are, hopefully, generous portions:

Foxes, like all undomesticated canids, are extremely intelligent. Once they have made a friend such as a big, fat rabbit, they always like to see if they can get even closer to him, perhaps by pulling a likely chain:

And here’s one of the very few photographs of Banksy Fox”…….

Next time, we take a look at the quality of the sausages available in the Iceland supermarket chain, exploring the views of one of their keenest consumers…………

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by | July 8, 2023 · 6:17 am

My best friend, Widdle (6)

The  colour and texture of a fox’s coat may vary due to the change in seasons.  It will be richer and denser in the colder months and lighter in the warmer months. To get rid of the dense winter coat, foxes moult once a year around April. The moult begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back, finishing with the neck and head.

Widdle was a fox who came to us, apparently around two years old, one day in 2007. He was looking for affection and for help. He came to us from a desire to understand nice human beings, and most of all, for unlimited access to good quality sausages:

Over the three to four years that we knew Widdle, his appearance changed a great deal. He was certainly not always what our American friends call a “red fox”, because in the spring and summer months, he was the hapless victim of his single annual moult.

According to Wikipedia, quoted above, a fox’s moult “begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back”. Sometimes in June, in the middle of the moult, Widdle looked rather like he’d been down to the pub the night before, and had a few too many:

In May, he had tried stretching exercises, but that didn’t last long:

No, the only remedy is a couple of sausages. Or so we thought. It was actually more complicated than that.

Widdle’s main problem with his coat was fleas, particularly during the moult. Here he is, scratching away. As far as we were aware, it was impossible for humans to be infected by fox fleas, and in up to four years with him, we never thought we had. I did once inquire about trying to give him something against fleas, but we were told it was pointless. Something for a dog and its fleas probably wouldn’t work. It might give him an allergic reaction and kill him. And, as soon as he went back to Mrs Widdle, he would be re-infected:

Male foxes fight quite a lot and here he is with part of his coat ripped off, I remember saying to him “That look’s a very painful wound.”, and he said “Well, you should have seen the other fella’.”

By winter, though, Widdle has acquired that magnificent coat that we all know and love. In this photograph, he shows that certainly as far as he is concerned, the neck is the last section to change.

Anyway, by early September, the transformation is complete. All that is missing is the white tip to his tail, which, as far as I recall,  Widdle never had. Well, not in full anyway:

And certainly, by November, it is as if he had been spray painted “fox-red”. He has lost all the black bits on his legs and the black and white stripes on the upper sides of his paws. He is Red Red Red:

The last picture comes from April 2010 when the very first signs of the Great Itching Time are beginning to appear. Even so, the coat still looks exceptionally thick and is standing on end to trap the warm air:

 

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