We live in an old lodge at the entrance to a private country estate in Hampshire. Through this blog, we write about life spent in the depths of the countryside.
The Lodge is currently under attack. A pair of aerial invaders have taken to persistently dive-bombing the Lodge’s windows. What fearsome foe is responsible for this unprovoked behaviour? A pair of tiny, long-tailed tits.
Long-tailed tit at the window
The first snowdrops are just beginning to poke their heads up through the leaf litter. The entrance to the Estate usually enjoys a thick carpet of them as February arrives, but there’s always one sheltered clump in particular that opens its flowers before the others, and this year is no exception.
The first snowdrops
Here at the Lodge, we’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months thinking about the large amount of grass we have to look after, and how best to tackle it in the future. We can’t be the only ones to go through this process during the off-season, so we thought we’d reach out to others to try to get a picture of what everyone else is doing.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. The Christmas turkey is on order, the decorations have been liberally sprinkled around the lodge, and the daffodils are up. Wait, what? That’s right, here on the estate, a few brave (or defective, depending on your outlook) daffodils have decided now is the time to poke their heads above ground and show-off their colour.
Would someone like to tell this daffodil that it's December?
While being surrounded by trees is lovely in the summer, it does create something of a problem come autumn – what to do with all those fallen leaves. Last year, I gathered them up and either left them in a huge pile or added them to our compost, but this year I felt there was something a little more useful I could do with them. So, we’ve made a leaf mould bin.
Leaf mould bin
Mowing the lawn at this time of year can be something of a challenge. Yes, there’s a lot of it, and yes, it grows quickly and needs cutting often. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the lawn is absolutely teeming with tiny toads (although they could conceivably be frogs, my amphibian ID skills aren’t the best).
A lawn full of toads
If you’ve read our post about our adventures into the world of cage-trapping rabbits, you might be wondering how we managed to capture video of the unfolding events, particularly at night. The answer is: we borrowed a Moultrie Game Spy I-45S Infrared Game Camera.
We often see rabbits in the garden at the lodge. It’s inevitable given our location and, for the most part, they confine themselves to chomping away on bits of the lawn and digging the odd hole in the flower beds. This we can deal with, and once a hole has been filled a couple of times, they get bored and move on. The non-diggers don’t normally return once chased off two or three times, either.
The villainous bunny
Do you think there’s a collective term for a large number of damselflies? A flitter, perhaps? A squadron? Either way, the lodge’s garden appears to have been requisitioned for use as a damselfly airbase lately; the tops of the fences make particularly good landing strips.
Damselfly: Beautiful Demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo)
Torrential rain and thunder storms dominated the evening before this year’s Bluebell Walk on the estate. Last year’s event was also rather damp, but who could have predicted that, after weeks of blistering sunshine, we’d suffer the same fate this year. Thankfully, though, as people began arriving, the rain withdrew. We were even treated to brief sunshine for the afternoon session.
Bluebell Walk gets underway