Travelling Jan: More Rambles with Reg

Green-veined White butterfly

Common Blue butterfly

Reg, the Labrador, was so chuffed to have been included in my September blog that he has asked to feature again! I am currently doing a house sit at the farm 15 minutes from home and have been here a week, during which time we have had some glorious weather!

'Princess' Spice on my jigsaw puzzle box

Since I was here in September a new cat has joined the household – Hilary’s Mum’s cat, Spice. She is a long haired tortoiseshell cat with an imperious air and I’ve taken to calling her Princess Spice as she seems to think that everyone, including me, is there purely for her benefit! I brought a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with me to while away the evenings and set it all out carefully on the dining table only for Princess Spice to leap gracefully onto the table and sit on the box, thereby obscuring the picture that I needed to refer to all the time. She obviously objected to my being distracted from her majesty by such a paltry thing as a jigsaw! Another time I was sitting, reading but she decided that she wanted a cuddle so climbed onto my lap and settled down – it’s immensely difficult to read a book with a large, fluffy cat curled up on your lap. She is rather beautiful, though, so I can forgive her a lot.

Because this little valley is so secluded and edged on two sides by woodland, there are plenty of birds and wildlife around. I sleep with my window open and have been greeted by the morning chorus every day, which starts at about 5.00am. Most of the birds are relatively quiet at first but there is a cock pheasant and his two wives who arrive under the front garden bird feeder early on and he does the loudest call and wing flutter! It almost sounds as if he’s in the room with me.

My favourite walk (and I suspect, Reg’s too) is the one I described in my September blog, but it is totally different in the Spring: the trees are just unfurling their soft green leaves and in the sun-dappled glades there are drifts of beautiful bluebells that scent the area with their delicate perfume, closely followed by huge swathes of wild garlic, now fully in flower, which also scent the area with their not-so-delicate perfume. I remember bluebell woods from my childhood, but I don’t recall wild garlic at all – perhaps it doesn’t grow as prolifically in Cotswold soils but here, on the Mendip Hills it grows everywhere! You could easily set up a lucrative business just making Wild Garlic Pesto. (My only foray into wild garlic pesto making was not a resounding success – it tasted delicious but quickly fermented in the jars and oozed oily green sauce everywhere. I still have no idea what I did wrong.)

Bluebells

Wild garlic

I now have a very good bird app on my phone (Merlin) which identifies songs in real time so that I can walk along with my phone out identifying which birds are calling at any one time. I know the more common birdsongs and these are here in abundance – robin, wren, blackbird, song thrush, the various tits, but there are others that I don’t recognise such as blackcaps and chiffchaffs. There is also a pair of Dippers that have a favourite vantage point on a rock in the stream by the farm entrance gate, but you have to creep up extremely stealthily to see them before they fly further downstream – needless to say I’ve only caught a glimpse of them once when I’ve been out with Reg – I don’t think ‘stealthy’ is in his repertoire.

Victims of ash die-back in Edford Wood

The other day Reg and I went on a walk that was new to me and in the opposite direction to Harridge Woods. Again we started off in woodland (Edford Wood) and this had a sign on the gate saying that the footpath was closed indefinitely due to the number of dead and dying ash trees that could shed branches but, as it was obviously still a very well-used footpath I decided to risk it – I guess the Woodland Trust who own these woods have to cover themselves against litigation. Once through the woods the footpath skirted a farm/industrial yard and headed uphill but Reg and I were unable to take it because, try as he might, Reg could not get through the bars of the stile – the first time this has happened on our walks as there is usually a dog-sized gap left to one side of the stile or there’s a kissing gate arrangement. In the end we had to walk through the farmyard onto the lane and continue on the road for about half-a-mile before we could regain the footpath in the village of Edford near a rather nice-looking farmshop and café (note to self: must come back here, without a dog in tow, and investigate further). The track we turned onto was obviously an ancient trackway linking Edford to the village of Pitcot as it had been ‘surfaced’ at one time with hard-packed stones. On this walk, as on many others, we saw lots of wildflowers in the hedgerows and fields: violets, primroses, bluebells, more wild garlic, greater stitchwort, cuckoo flowers, jack-by-the-hedge, and lousewort (a new one for me). In a few week’s time it will all have changed again and other flowers will be dominant.

Ancient trackway between villages

Violets

Lousewort

Cuckoo flower (or Lady's Smock)

When I was last here in September there were thousands of acorns on the ground, but also thousands of beech nuts. I picked up a few acorns and planted them but every single one was carefully removed from the seed tray by a rodent of some description - possibly a squirrel. However the beech seeds had to be treated differently in that they had to overwinter in my fridge to simulate a cold winter! In February I noticed that a lot of the seeds had roots growing so I popped them into seed trays and left them in the shed to see what would happen. Imagine my surprise and delight when the majority of them sprouted - I now have about 15 beech seedlings that I have no idea what to do with!

Beech seedlings

The mummy/daddy beech trees

Reg is not really interested in all this flora and fauna (he didn’t even chase a squirrel that leaped across the path in front of him!) His main interests are finding interesting ‘sniffs’ and collecting sticks/logs that he will carry for some distance to bring them home – he obviously takes his firewood collecting duties very seriously, as shown in my September blog! His other great love is to throw himself into streams, preferably after a stick. He seems to still be very fussy about the sticks he will bring back for me to throw again – if they don’t meet his exacting standards he just stands chest deep in the water and chews them to splinters before giving me a look that asks me to find something more suitable. Because a lot of dog-walkers frequent Harridge Woods and obviously play the same games, it is difficult to find a suitable stick in the immediate locality. I decided to take one of Reg’s many tennis balls with me so that we wouldn’t have to carry sticks for long distances but this was obviously not an acceptable substitution as he just stood and watched as it got swept away downstream – I wonder how far it got before it snagged on a branch or got washed into the shallows?

Reg enjoying a dip

Reg and stick

The house has a first floor outside decking area over the kitchen extension and this made a super spot for me to watch some wildlife one evening. I’d spotted four roe deer a few evenings before on the edge of the woods but, on this particular occasion there were just two, a buck and a doe, and I watched them for ages just outside the garden in the field. Then, my attention was caught by another deer, but it wasn’t a roe deer, it was a muntjac. These little deer stand about the same height as Reg and, at first, I thought it was a dog but then it came nearer and nearer until it was in the furthest part of the garden browsing on a small tree on the boundary. They are not a native species and were originally part of the collection at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire from where a few escaped. They obviously found the English countryside to their liking and have rapidly spread across the country – unlike our native deer they can breed all year round with rapid increases in population.