Sunrise at Parlington and everyday country life.

The temperature at 7:00 am today was around -5.0° and leaving the estate by car, the padlock securing the gates on the driveway was frozen, fortunately previous experience has taught me to have a warming device to hand, to free the mechanism. After a couple of minutes with my camping lighter, which is like a mini blowlamp, the lock mechanism freed up and I was able to open the gates and proceed beyond Narnia, which is how Parlington seems at this time of year, and over to Saxton. Passing by the Crooked Billet, on route, I noticed that the place looked decidedly undisturbed by visitors, perhaps it has closed down?

I returned to Parlington around sunrise and was pleasantly greeted by the scene you see in the picture at the head of this post. The cold weather has provided us with an excellent opportunity for taking pretty landscape pictures. Only yesterday I was talking to a lady who was seeking to catch the whisps of light snow falling from the trees on the main Parlington drive. Armed with her digital SLR she was hoping to catch that icing sugary spray that gentle breezes across tree branches can produce. The snow has been on trees for days now, and as the temperature has rarely risen above zero centigrade, it has remained in a fine powdery state, so the slight breeze was sufficient to cause these micro-avalanches.

The sub-zeros temperatures have encouraged the usual collection of birds to telegraph their friends and relatives, who are all enjoying the endless supply of seeds and nuts my wife provides, hourly re-stocking the feeders! There is a down side to this, the overspill on to the ground, attracts unwanted visitors. So Roland Rat and his extended family have taken residence in a hole in the garden nearby. They, along with the pheasants compete for the seeds which fall from the seed feeders. It is amusing to note the pecking order [pun intended] the rats are very wary of the pheasants with their ability to strike a savage blow with their beaks on the back or head of the rodents. All are frightened of me, despite the fact I am assisting their wellbeing.

The order of things is most evident in the country, the pheasants, are refugees from the woods, realizing that they are out of the combat zone, and can survive on human endowments provided they stay in the curtledge of the hall. Beyond they are most likely to fall to the guns, sometimes it sounds like a civil war enactment is in progress. Even as I write are the crack of guns from a shooting party, well at least they eat the catch. Then wherever you are in the woodland there are plenty of wood pigeons, from time to time I come across their remains, stumps of the wings and a profusion of feathers on the ground; prey no doubt to some aerial invader, there are many hawks around, but of all the birds of prey, I am most impressed by the sheer size and effortless gliding of the red kites.

Small rodents and rabbits also have much to be afraid of, there are no end of circling birds waiting to swoop down and scoop them up in their claws, another predator is Matilda our cuddly cat, who has a darker side, she is a merciless killer of small furry mammals and less so birds. A brush with a pheasant taught Matilda to be wary of things with beaks! But she has credits on her fusilage from her forays with small rabbits and the odd grey squirrel. The dog, Meg, not to be outdone, chases after everything, and twice to my knowledge has caught a rat. Although the recent visitors, Roland as I have termed him, seems to have outwitted the dog at every turn. The consequence of the dogs inability to reign in the growth of the rodent population has led me to take extreme measures. Thus far I have tried the trench warfare approach of hiding in a dugout, well sort of, whilst waiting for one of the little blighters to show its head over the trench line. This is a cold and thankless task, so we have used more subtle tactics, employed in days of yore, by trapping the pests in a cunningly constructed cage trap. Sadly this requires an executioner to carry out the summary sentence, of the imprisoned rodent, a bullet, well air rifle slug, through the brain. Helen, decided this was too much to bear, well she is a nurse, so we are on to chemical warfare now, with rat poisoning, but with all the other creatures around this is a tricky call.

I really don’t like poison, the lingering death is horrible, better the swift execution. Some visitors think I am heartless for dealing with the rats in this way, saying, why not live and let live? To be honest these folk tend to be from the cities, if they have a problem they call in the Pest Control Officer, (notice the avoidance of anything suggesting death), who does the dirty work and they carry on with life undisturbed, these people are of the same ilk as those who are un-aware of the daily goings on in an abattoir, here things are a bit more brutal. I look at it like this, there is plenty of space for the small, and not so small rodents, in the woods and field edges. I will not bother them, but if the decide to camp out in the garden, and send raiding parties, to retrieve the bird seed, they are fair game! But it should be done as painlessly as possible, for them and me!

On a lighter note to finish this blog; I saw a snipe yesterday taking the opportunity beneath the fir trees, where there is little snow, to seek out small grubs and worms with its exeedingly long beak. The picture below is from the RSPB site, the picture is a link to the page about the snipe.

Snipe [Latin: Gallinago gallinago]