In message , Judith Lea
writes
?

We get an enormous number of pheasant and other game birds in our
garden. The damage they cause, is far outweighed by the pleasure they
give me. e.g. The pheasants lay their eggs in the strangest of places,
the greenhouse which has a hole in the lower glass where they can come
and go although I have seen some of their eggs laying in the vegetable
garden where predators have taken them.

They roll all over veggies and scrape out some sort of dust bowls! I
have a badger, lots of frogs and toads, a young deer, foxes, ducks,
hedgehogs, families of poussin type birds and even a dreadful ferret and
a wicked feral cat who are frequent visitors. I get lots of grey
squirrels and I love them despite their bad press and often feed them,
they are almost tame now. I consider myself privileged to watch their
comings and goings.

One morning I opened the sitting room curtains to find a hare sitting
about 5 feet outside the window, staring in at me. I don't know who was
more surprised! Another day when we were eating breakfast, a grey
heron strolled along the path just outside the window. The red
squirrels have reappeared today now that the snow has melted away. And
as for the pheasants - could they be the culprits who took a fancy to
the kale, which is growing by the path, just under the sitting room
window? Or, was it more likely the hare? Anyway, said kale has been
tucked up under old net curtains ever since I found the damage last
November. I haven't tried growing anything else here as the ground is
pretty horrendous and the property doesn't belong to us anyway.

There won't be any gardening to do until we move into our own home in
the Autumn. Then we will have hares, partridge and pheasants in the
field at the bottom of the garden - goodness knows what else will turn
up. The Arran Banner (the island newspaper) says there are usually grey
lag and white fronted geese in the Shiskine valley , which is where
we'll be living. I shall miss the red squirrels who don't, as far as I
know, live in that area of Arran. We'll have to work out what will and
won't grow and what sort of defences against the local wildlife after
the builders have finished and gone.
We're very fond of kale - it should be hardy enough to cope with most
things, shouldn't it?


--
Susie Thompson
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