Springwatch – The Alternative View

What is it with the animal kingdom? You spend your life being nice to animals – apart from moles, which get all they deserve – and what do they do? I’ll tell you what they do. They go out of their way to wear you down.



Let’s get the moles out of the way first of all (and how I wish we could). Our garden this year is riddled with mole runs. It’s impossible to walk around the garden without sinking, sometimes almost ankle deep, into the turf. OK, that’s hardly the end of the world. It makes maintenance difficult and the molehills make a bit of a mess of the garden but that’s just about bearable. However, when they get in amongst the food crops and/or expensive plants they become a real problem. Consider our poor tomato plants. Tomatoes form a very important crop for us. Not only do they provide a lot of our food in summer, thereby giving us fresh, healthy, chemical-free food on the doorstep as well as reducing our shopping bills, but they also go into pasta sauces, soups etc for the winter. This year, growing them has been a real struggle. The very warm and dry April has been followed by cool and damp weather throughout May and so far in June. Consequently, the poor things are really struggling. However, several have died off completely due to being undermined by mole-runs. This is just the sort of sabotage that we’ve come to expect from the despicable mole and explains our zero-tolerance approach.



What about the other creatures though? Apart from flies, mosquitoes and ants (don’t get me going on ants), we’re nice to everything. We feed the birds in winter, we give carrots and apples to donkeys, we talk to the cows(!), we make a fuss of dogs, we leave wild areas for butterflies, hedgehogs and other creatures. How are we rewarded? We’re rewarded by constant noise and disturbance, that’s how. OK, during the day you expect dogs to bark a bit, but it really would be nice if our local West Highland White didn’t yap almost continuously. Butterflies are very beautiful and interesting, except when they have no difficulty finding the open windows on the way into the house but can’t find a way out. Consequently there are often dozens of them fluttering around the house and scaring Mrs A to distraction.

It’s during the night that we really suffer though. The cattle, especially the bulls, can make a fearful racket in the middle of the night. Owls are always hooting and screeching. Donkeys ee-or regularly. ‘Things’ scrabble around in the roof spaces. The cat has noisy disagreements with pine martens. (On top of that, she knows when we can have a lie-in, or grasse matinée - fat morning - as we call them here. If we have to get up early, she's a quiet as a mouse - not that she'd know what one of those was. However, if we can lie-in, she's screaming outside the window from 6 o'clock onwards.) But in May and June, the pinnacle of noise creation is the dawn chorus. For unreliable sleepers such as yours truly, there’s nothing quite like being awoken at 5 a.m. every day for two months. Hundreds of the little, and not so little, beggars seem to line up just outside our windows to welcome the day, impress the opposite sex, argue about politics or whatever it is they do. It’s just as well I’m a fairly phlegmatic person or I could get quite grumpy about it all.

I’m off to bed while the little swine are reasonably quiet!