Wildlife not Wild Life!

   

Our house is, it's very safe to say, truly rural! We live in a hamlet of only 4 houses, one of which is a holiday home and the other two are the farmhouse and a property that belongs to the farm which, we think, has one of the farm workers living in it. Consequently there's not exactly a huge amount of night life (or wild partying) happening around us. Now this suits us fine, but wouldn't be for everybody. It's peaceful and at night we can see the stars and hear the crickets, birds and Marsh frogs. 

Now we're not tweeters (or bird watchers to most people) but we are interested in birds and wild life, and although we lived on the edge of Salisbury plain, which had a wide variety of wildlife, in our garden at home we mostly saw sparrows and an occasional blue tit! Since we have been here we have sat in our house and seen greater spotted woodpeckers, green woodpeckers (this morning!), gold finches, chaffinches, blue tits (obviously), sparrows, starlings, pigeons and most impressively black redstarts! We're becoming fascinated by the birds around us and listening to the wide variety of bird calls. 

On more than one occasion we've had partridges in the garden - much to the delight of the dogs, but fortunately there's been no casualties! We've seen signs of both foxes and badgers in the garden but not actually seen the animals themselves. And living in the outside walls are a lot of wall lizards - we've nicknamed them geckos but know that that's not what they really are. And I never realised just how many different bees, spiders and other creepy crawlies there are. Some of them I'm not so keen on to be fair, and the field crickets which hide in holes in the lawn are noisy and much bigger than I ever expected!

Wall lizard

Anyway suffice it to say that there's always something to watch in the garden and local area but it does prove that you have to take the time to look around you to really see things properly. We could quite easily have missed the black redstarts as they aren't particularly stunning to look at, and I would have missed the green woodpecker if hubby hadn't spotted it.

So remember, keep your eyes open while you go about your day, and see what you can spot that you have missed before...