West Ham Online

"I thought you might like this video.



It's a compilation of different birds singing. Beautiful photography. If you expand the 'title' under the video it gives a list of species and the times they pop up in the video. Most of the species are familiar to us in the UK, but there are some 'exotics' (the cranes - wow, what a noise!) It was filmed in Belarus. The guy has a channel you can subscribe to. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and maybe it'll take your mind off you-know-what for a few blessed minutes."

"Nurse, Yes they do flock. Chuck some old apples out on the lawn when it gets a bit colder."

"I bet though that if I actually developed 'car nip' with a few fancy words and a sell buy date people would actually buy it. ""Car nip, well we haven't got that""..?.?."

"Gph, I reckon the car nip would probably b better short term than the cat nip. The latter gets them off their guard and there are years worth of territorial ground they lose in 5 minutes whilst on the nip."

"Too many cats in our street for my liking, the robins never seem to hold down a territory probably because they get fed up of stressing over cats everywhere. The blackbirds do however remain and seem to plod on with sticking around here. Lack of starling activity compared to normal years is a bit worrying."

"Sorry to pick on a typo, but car nip plants sound a bit worrying..."

"Thanks for the reminder, azel. I had a single redwing visit my tree a few times earlier in the year, so I now know they cut about round here. Obviously I have no way of knowing if it was the same redwing each time. They're supposed to flock, aren't they? I just saw one each time."

Should be starting to see the Redwing and Fieldfare dropping in about now.

"Exe Wonderful Ours are true rural foxes, so far more naturally cautious of humans. We have also been at pains to keep them 'their side' of the fence so as to not humanise them and their activity starts around dusk, never seen during the day time"

"Crassus, I thought the same, that it might be a 'time of the year' type scenario, was a vixen and two cubs, with the male only very occassionaly seen. There's a small Anderson shelter in the unused garden next door and I wondered if they were living under or even in it. The cubs used to start playing around in the garden just before dawn and it was good to watch, all of them nonchalant as well, sitting on the wall in broad daylight even if you went within a few feet of them."

"Exe I may be able to shed some light on the fox situation At this time of year they often move off to either establish territory, find a mate or both. The vixens then vanish through late winter as they give birth and lay up in their earth, only to reappear with cubs in Spring We had a group appear in the fields at the back, and began feeding them in May. The vixen comes every night and waits if we are out. The cubs have grown on and either moved or perished albeit, we still have up to three foxes plus 'Vixy' attending the nightly feast A good policy is to give them the occasional doughnut, sweet toothed is a fox, then if you see them with mange or some such, medication can be injected within a doughnut Must admit, I have become rather fond of her"

"I was stood in a wood in Hampshire yesterday ,a buck fallow deer walked behind me about 25 yards away . Big lump . A real deep brown almost black in colour ,it got a whiff of me and broke into a canter , my lab gave it a gentle woof !"

"Had foxes in the garden but they seem to have moved on and actually miss them. The racket halfway through the night not so much. Would love hedgehogs if only to see the reaction of a neighbours OCD cat who I swear notices the falling of a single leaf. Think hedgehogs would blow its mind and maybe distract him from the turf war he's been unsuccessfully running to defend a coup!e car nip plants. Nurse, now that the sex of the hedgehog has been determined have you considered a bit more of a feminine name for it, maybe Tankette?"

I have the juvenile fox back kipping at the bottom of the garden. He/She my cat and me have come to an understanding. The fox looks very healthy and obviously well fed.

Yes it is. Good that the sun is still about. The colours haven't come out here yet - that's my favourite bit.

Yes it is. Good that the sun is still about. The colours haven't come out here yet - that's my favourite bit.

*waits for half-days of freezing fog*

Isn't autumn glorious?

"I broke a huge web this afternoon while gardening - didn't see it until it was too late. But I did apologize to the spider, so that's OK, isn't it? Exeter - I expect it was a sunny day when you saw all those webs in your garden - they show up so much more and look splendid."

"I feel your dilemma. I always feel really guilty if I have to break a spider web. One of my araneus diadematus caught a wasp yesterday. I took a (poor) photo of the scene, the wasp, all wrapped up in the web with the spider sitting beside it. Marvellous. Meanwhile on the hedgehog front: my 'main' guest, 'Tank', turned out to be female, which I kinda deduced when she started walking around with one of her babies/juveniles trailing her, feeding side by side and occasionally nuzzling. I don't know if I missed seeing the rest of the litter before they left her, or if this little hoglet (christened 'Biscuit') is the only one that survived. Mother and (apparently) now independent offspring are sharing my garden. Biscuit is getting bigger by the day. I've bought two SPLENDID hedgehog hibernacula. Really well constructed. For a few nights I put a small amount of kibble in both 'bed chambers' just to encourage them to explore. The food was eaten, and my daughter and I watched them exploring the houses. For the first time early this evening I felt a significant chill in the air, so I swept out the houses and put some 'fresh meadow hay*' loosely inside and also some outside, hoping it will give them a hint. I'm a bit worried Tank might either be pregnant or recently given birth. They sometimes have a late second litter but the babies are at risk of not being big/fat enough to survive hibernation. I might need to rescue them if that happens. *smells gorgeous."

"Garden dilemmas... Spider webs Is there a special day of the year similar to flying ant day, where spiders have a sort of display of webs day? Only my garden has gone from having none throughout the summer to 101 Charlotte's webs in the space of a week Took some really close up photograph of a spider spinning its web, and that web is now one of the biggest and impressively designed spiders web I've ever seen. I like to think we were inspiring each other Problem I have now is that the web in question cramps my movements in the garden unless I walk right through one of the threads holding the whole fucking thing together, and after watching him/her building it, I can't do that with a clear conscience. I'm of the John Lydon 'never trust a hippy' school of thought but fear I may be turning into one."

(Info from Fire of Learning youtube channel - but they didn't say why the ancients didn't know about Sainsburys)

Sainsbury.

"No-one in ancient Europe knew where cinnamon came from, although Ethiopia was their best bet (poosibly a result of misinformation by Arab traders). But the ancient Greeks thought they knew how the inhabitants of wherever the fuck it was harvested it. They thought that the cinnamonbolus bird made its nests out of cinnamon, and the natives gave these birds so much meat that these nests collapsed under their sheer weight. It was then a simple matter to collect the cinnamon from the detritus of the broken nests on the ground."

Don't know what I've had done without my garden last 18 months. Sit out in it about 4 times more than I ever did before.

"There are 2 robins in our street vying for territory, seen them squaring up to each other a few times but not seen them come to blows yet."