Obviously lockdown is taking its toll, and we have started naming the wildlife in lieu of having pets or any other human contact.
We’ve covered young Kenny Leveret before:
Kenny Leveret
There’s also a small bird that likes to flit in and out of a wood pile at the back of the house. Obviously we weren’t going to go Dam Busters on that one, so I present to you Sophia (the wren):
Sophia the wren
There’s a dog that likes to visit too, but he always has a big muzzle on his face (apparently due to messing with clothes on washing lines). To protect his privacy (does GDPR cover dogs?) I’m not posting a still from a security camera at the moment, but his name is Hannibal Dogter. I imagine he does eat liver, but not necessarily with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Finally (for now), we have Eric the bank vole. I don’t know why he’s called that, but it seems a reasonable name for him. He likes hanging around the turf stack. No photos yet.
The weather got very cold again – walking on the bog, the sphagnum moss crunched underfoot, unlike its usual squelchy/springy response.
Frosty moss
The light was exceptionally bright though – the first field benefitted from it a lot:
Sunny rushes
By far the most exciting event of the day was the arrival of a new fridge/freezer. We’d been getting by for months with an electric (Peltier) coolbox, but with great uncertainly on the horizon with COVID-19, we thought replacing the old broken fridge/freezer would be a sensible option.
Since a lot of the companies don’t know how much longer they’re going to be able to trade, the one we chose bent over backwards to fulfil the order. I phoned them and paid them, and the fridge was with us less than three hours later. They took away the old one too (thanks to the genius of the EU’s WEEE legislation from 2008). The new one is a Beko, as they seem to be one of the only companies that produce fridge/freezers that are designed to be ok in unheated rooms (which the kitchen often is), and had one short enough to fit under the slightly esoteric kitchen cabinet layout we have.
New Beko fridge freezer
The evening light was amazing too… some very cheery shepherds I imagine:
After the total non-event of Saint Patrick’s Day, we head up to the house on the bog to see how things are going. It turns out that things are going pretty well, apart from the weather which is bleak.
The daffodils are starting to flower (well, technically one daffodil has showed up, but better than nothing).
First daffodil of the year
In other news, the gates have been mostly installed now: one near the top of the drive (the main entrance), and one across the entry into the first field (over which there is no right of way).
First field gate
The main entrance gate hasn’t been fitted properly yet, as the distance between the gate posts was wider than they’d anticipated (due to tree roots / dodgy ground, either of which is actually believable). He’s going to have to come back again with different gate hinges once they’ve been made. Picture shows the not-very-confidence-inspiring temporary measure of a wooden block to keep the bolt in:
A visionary fusion of galvanised metal and wood unites the past and the future in a hopefully-temporary hack…
The gorse is flowering beautifully and it feels like Spring is beginning to take its job more seriously than it has up until now.
Gorse
We spent a bit of the afternoon walking on the beach and up on the cliffs in Ballybunion, which blew the cobwebs away nicely.
Obviously horsemen (or women) of any kind are not to be welcomed, but it seems like some of the classic ones are very busy visiting people right now.
Rainbow
We’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of named storms, the most recent of which is being enjoyed in Ireland because it gives people the opportunity to mispronounce ‘Jorge’ in revenge for the mangling of ‘Ciara’ earlier in the month.
There’s been snow, hail, sunshine and horizontal rain at unpredictable times, so we’ve had to make the best of any outdoor time available.
They said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong. The drilling device / soothsaying blog post title was just waiting to be published, albeit messily.
We’d bought a load of daffodil bulbs a few months ago and still had some hanging around in their net bags, silently judging us for not planting them.
I got to wondering if there was something I could attach to an electric drill to make the holes in the ground without the hassle of using a spade.
I found quite a lot of things on Amazon that looked like they’d do the job, and bought the one that looked the most solid:
Auger
I’ve cunningly taken the photo hand-held from close-up, with the door quite far in the distance. This makes the auger look massive, but it’s actually not too hefty – it drills holes 8cm in diameter, and 30cm deep.
From extensive use this afternoon, I came to the following conclusions:
Drills are fun, but dangerous
The outdoors is a messy place
There are a surprising number of rocks and stones in the soil
Worms encountering it end up like spaghetti wrapped around a fork
When you get a clear run down, it’s like using a food processor on the earth – it goes all broken-up and light
Here are some of the holes produced. It should be noted that there aren’t any moles in Ireland (probably despite the efforts of UK mole-catchers attempting to create a gap in the market). It absolutely wouldn’t be quite good fun to make some of these at a golf course. No, it wouldn’t. No.
I like the concept of making little molehills out of a mountain, anyway.
Not, disappointingly, a band specialising in covers of songs by the Hull-based sophisti-pop duo fronted by Tracey Thorn, performed by someone looking like the frizzy-haired brock-loving guitarist from Queen, but an update on the wildlife captured from the device formerly known as badgercam.
badgercam in situ
So far, it has been visited by:
A magpie. I can sort-of see the point of this – an easy mistake for the bird to make. I could try to make the camera look more like a large mammal, I suppose, but don’t have the raw materials to hand.
A blackbird. Hmm. Not impressed.
An aggressively-inquisitive robin. Actually, the robins here all seem to be like that. It’s impossible to do anything outside without it being watched-over by one.
So, not a resounding success (except that the robin didn’t manage to destroy it, despite its best efforts):
I suspect that the badger was just passing through looking for somewhere with food and shelter… maybe it has given up now and is standing in the middle of the road, waiting for the eternal release of a speeding Ford Mondeo.
Last night a badger was caught on one of the security cameras bustling off into the undergrowth down the side of the driveway/track/ditch.
The weather has been brutal here for a number of weeks, punishing us with the full range of named storms. This has led to some of the wildlife being a bit more visible than normal – the other week I had to slow down while driving along as a couple of rabbits chose a really daft time to try to cross the road.
I’m hoping that the badger has taken up residence here, as at least it shows that we’re not the only things daft enough to spend a lot of time in this wilderness.
Anyway, last night’s footage was from a camera mounted on the electricity pylon (tall wooden pole with bits taken out of it by careless turf-cutters and their tractors), reasonably high up. The camera’s wireless, just to be clear – I’m not running a cable up the side of the thing of course.
The angle of view wasn’t great, but you can make out enough to know it’s a badger at least.
I decided to try to go one better today, so added another camera at ground level. To make the badger feel more comfortable with its extra surveillance, I designed a stunningly realistic badger-cam so it would blend in.
After careful consideration of the impact on the badger of any uncanny valley-based reaction, with heavy heart I had to tone down the realism just a notch to this:
I’m still not convinced it will be enough to prevent the badger running off into the sunset with the device, but I’m hoping for the best.
To sweeten the already massively alluring deal, I fecked a lot of vegetable peelings into the hedge around the area of last sighting. So with a bit of luck tomorrow will bring some better wildlife videos…
Update: day 2 of badgerwatch has resulted in absolutely nothing. The barcode-furred monster hasn’t made its way past the new camera at all, despite being showered with gifts (well, potato scraps)
