The giddy limit…

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Mice

We have a mouse problem.  A problem exacerbated by the fact that while all three of the felines who turn up for several square meals a day are keen hunters they only do outside, not under the sink.  So last night when a mouse popped out from under the dishwasher intending to see if anything had fallen out of the vegetable rack Kevin had a large ‘Not On Duty’ sign in between his ears and barely allowed my shouts of ‘Get Out of Here’ to disturb his entirely undeserved beauty sleep.

The local mice seem to look on our house as the Welcome Saloon.  They have the measure of the cats, they must know that we don’t use poison and there’s at least one super-mousebrain amongst them because I swear they’ve worked out how to get the chocolate off a mouse trap without springing it. What other explanation is there for all the empty but charged traps?

The final straw came this morning.  I heard shouts from the OH and found him in the downstairs shower room pointing at the loo.  Inside was a mouse doing lengths. Naturally it fell to me to deal with it.

I contemplated fetching Kevin and giving him a lesson in fishing or something.Instead I fetched a soup ladle (anguished exclamations from the OH, ‘We eat from that!’  Me, ‘That’s why we have a sink, disinfectant, washing up liquid…’).  I loathe mice but even the hardest heart would have softened at this small wet thing gamely doing mouse stroke.  It wasn’t particularly willing to be rescued but I scooped it up in the end and put in out in the garden, knowing full well that it’ll probably be back under the sink by this evening.

I reckon I’m pretty tolerant but I absolutely draw the line at sharing my lavatory with rodents so I’m going to redouble my efforts to find one of those live mouse traps which seem to have vanished from the shops.  They work pretty well providing you take the mice for a nice long drive in the car before releasing them.

Of course they’re housemice so it would be unkind to leave them in the middle of nowhere but it’s hardly friendly to let them out to colonise someone else’s house.  On the other hand is there anyone I really don’t like…?

Look what we found in the pool…

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salamanders

The OH was doing the last clean out of the pool yesterday and fished out what he thought was a dead un.  Then this handsome little chap started moving.

We’ve never seen a live salamander before, but one thing I did know is that these ones are poisonous to cats and dogs.  Since Kevin has already had a bad case of lizard tummy (he’s so greedy that I think he’d eat a worm given the chance), my daughter took the salamander well away and put him on a vine post to warm up in the sun.

Fortunately she then looked up salamanders on the net and discovered that they aren’t lizards, they’re amphibians and some of them are newts.  Or rather newts are salamanders.  Quite opposite to what you might think and what legend would have you believe, most salamanders don’t like the heat.  She was in effect frying the poor thing’s brains by warming it up.  So the salamander was removed to the edge of the spring in the woods where it’s cool and humid as they like it.  We trust that he salamandered happily off.

Animal Life

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nightingales, squirrels

I can remember being told before we moved here that there was no wildlife left in the French countryside, ‘The hunters kill everything that moves, don’t you know?  And everything that doesn’t is sprayed so there are no insects or birds.’

It’s true that the hunters do seem to blast everything (though they seem to miss most of the deer and sanglier around here), come October all the birds disappear – though they reappear again the week after the hunting season is over, and I’m frankly appalled at the amount of spraying.  The Bordeaux region is too damp to make bio feasible, if the grapes weren’t sprayed for mildew the growers would lose a large part of the crop most years but even growers who have opted for a semi bio approach, spraying as little as possible, seem to be out there most weeks in the summer putting something or other on the vines.  And let’s not talk about the spraying of the verges and the obsession most gardeners here seem to have with eradicating every single weed with liberal applications of weedkiller.

So is it Silent Spring around here?  Not a bit of it.  I was walking the dogs this afternoon and along the edge of the vines are wild muscari, violets and all sorts of other wild flowers I don’t know the names of.  They have cowslips here which I last saw in England when I was about six and in a few weeks time, I’ll be hoovering up tiny wild strawberries which grow in between the rows of vines.

The first time I saw a Kingfisher was in France, we had woodpeckers in the tree outside our last house and we see hares, such a joyous sight, nearly every week in the vines around the house.

Who wouldn't enjoy this?

I’d never heard a Nightingale until I lived here (there were several of them and jolly noisy they were too), nor a Screech Owl.  That was not a joy as it made its home in the tree outside our bedroom window.  Screech Owls are well named.  Last week my husband saw five Hoopoes in the garden which answered the question of whether we’d been hearing Cuckoos or not.

There are loads of butterflies too, we’ve always happened to live near woods so I suppose that helps, last summer a Purple Emperor came into the kitchen and settled on the tiles for long enough for us to admire his colouring before he fluttered back to the oak trees.  But for me, the things that lifts my spirits more than anything else are the squirrels.

We had two walnut trees in the garden of our first house and it was only a few hundred metres from an experimental nut farm developing new varieties so it’s not surprising that it was squirrel paradise.  I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw a red shape slinking across the grass, I’d never seen a red squirrel outside a zoo.  We got quite used to seeing them, though we were always enchanted.  One of the squirrels was a real Squirrel Nutkin and seemed to go out of his way to bait the cat, unwise of him as the cat had already dealt with the magpie who’d tried much the same trick before…

The inevitable happened, my husband came hurtling in with an enraged cat whom he’d pulled off the squirrel and instructed me to go out and finish the poor thing off.  Me?  I gingerly approached it, wondering if I was going to be able to do the deed and saw that apart from having been sucked it didn’t appear to have any other injuries.  I picked it up,  realising it was simply comatose from shock and gave it a little rub to get its circulation going again.  It had the most wonderful fur, deep, plush and red.  It was astonishing to be so close to such a shy wild creature.  After a couple of minutes it moved, so I put it at the bottom of a tree and a groggy, and throughly ungrateful, squirrel disappeared upwards.

It sensibly never baited the cat again.  It took the cat some time to forgive us.