Tuesday 9 September 2008

Strange urban wildlife moments

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in my doctor's waiting room. This is a light and airy double height space with some sort of plexi-glass (or equal approved) roof. Suddenly there was a rattling and scratching and general loud noise. I looked up to see what was going on and on the roof I could see the outline of two bird-shaped feet pottering about... with a vaguer fuzzy outline of a bird-shaped body. One of the burgeoning local rook population had stopped to see if there was anything edible for a bird. I'm thinking he was disappointed.

I arrived home from the doctor and parked up in the driveway. As I got out of the car there was a flurry of squirrel tail. A small squirrel was waiting for me to get out of the way so he could rush across the driveway and back to his tree. In his mouth was the most enormous conker... clearly a prize worth having! As I unlocked the front door the squirrel darted across the drive, still clutching his conker-prize (half the size of his head it was, once would have been the apple of a small boy's eye) and shot back up the tree.

My final wildlife moment came in the evening when Rich found Small Toad in the kitchen (he was checking for snails after the recent rainy weather). Small Toad doesn't usually get much farther than a few foot from the door, but this time he'd made it all across the room and was about to hide behind the freezer. Luckily Rich managed to dissuade him just in time and I scooped him up and took him back to the Frog Pond where he joined King Frog for the rest of the evening.