Manky Monkey Motors

We get loads of animals in our garden. No fence at the end of the garden & it leads straight onto the 800 acre estate we live on, so we get everything from foxes to deer to cows, (yes really), wandering in.
Also get all manner of winged thingies, from bats to woodpeckers to Jays to pheasants, although the pheasants usually walk in.
There's about a dozen ring necked Parakeets living wild on the estate & we get visited by them quite regularly. These two dropped in for breakfast this morning. They must be last year's hatchlings cos they don't get their red neck rings till after their first moult.
              -Manky Attenborough.

Less welcome visitors. Got a family of rats living next door who come under the fence to feed on the grain dropped by the birds. They're big buggers, (about 10 inches long). This is about 20 feet from our back door. Just part of country life I'm told & to be honest they don't bother me at all, as long as they stay outside the house. We love watching the squirrels feeding. These guys aren't much different really, but don't have quite the same appeal.

it looks like a fantastic place to live
you lucky pair  ;D

The hot water's packed up & it's cold, dark & muddy outside. Wanna buy a rat?

hahaha i get the picture now andy
nice views nice visitors but the rest sux lol

Nah, I must admit it's great really. As a former townie it's taken some getting used to, but trudging round the grubby streets of Basingstoke every day, delivering mail to immigrants & benefit claimants, I can't wait to get home to the tranquilty of the countryside.

i know where ya coming from m8 i was born a townie and have lived in the countryside for 14 years and love it
bedlam and the city is only a 20 Min's drive away if ever i feel the need for some hell  ;D

Rural retreats.

When I was a postie down in Marlborough, I had a big caravan at a Forestry Comission site, in Sevenake Forest.
Just wonder where the Brock is situated?
I used to deliver the High Street, all eight hundredweight of the stuff!!
and on the second delivery part of the London Road (was it called that?) and Elcot Lane.

I couldn't run to buy a gaff there, as the house prices had gone mental at that time.
Swindon was pulling in a lot of out of townies, as the old railway works was being offered up a low rates.
Therefore loads of London firms moved their (on London wages) management there.
The countryside properties were snapped up and the prices pushed up.

It was great, up the forest.
It is an ancient one.

I had some geezers next to me re rigging national grid pylons across Salisbury Plain.
If a thunder storm was coming they would be phoned to get OFF.

One day the were cooking a tin (beans IN the tin) of baked beans in a saucepan under a pylon.
Lightning hit the pylon, arcced across and fused it all together!!

My HOG pictured near where I stayed in Sevenake Forest.
An empty, but really Alice in Wonderland feel house, in the background.

So you were the bad man that bought all my bills, High street.
   Was Andy running the site when you were there ?

Hi Brock,
Must have been about ten years back.
Now I'm in a drive all over the place at a legal 60mph town.
Milton Keynes.
We have some SERIOUS Landie playpits, and serious Landie/Range/Strangerovers up here.

Ah! Milton Keynes the land of little boxes and concrete cows.

Some squirrels from this morning looking very cute and fluffy

Very fat too - you're obviously feeding them well!

Like furry beach balls!

Baggie in Canada says:

"Look what I saw in my back garden. We have more than America."

Looks like a partridge after feeding from the flour sack :D

It's definitely not one of our Parakeets.

Would help with your rodent poblem tho, and every other garden visitor  ;D

 ;D

We get lesser spotted woodpeckers in our garden. Saw a pair on our bird feeders only this morning, along with a pair of Jays. The woodpeckers are black & white with a bright red bum & about the size of a starling. They live in the oak tree at the bottom of our garden & feed on insects & the peanut feeders we have.
There are 3 species of woodpecker in Britain, but that's the only ones we've seen here.
Just glanced into next door's garden from an upstairs window though, & there, right in the middle of their lawn was a green woodpecker. Much bigger, halfway between the size of a blackbird & a pigeon. Bright green with a black face & a red cap on it's head -the ones that used to feature on Bulmer's cider labels. They feed on insects too, especially ants, which is why it was pecking at the lawn & not a tree. 24,000 breeding pairs in Britain.
So how come it doesn't come into our garden?
-& before anyone says it, no I wasn't peering into next door's garden with a telephoto lens when I saw it. I grabbed the camera after I spotted it!

Their lawn's a bit posher than ours.
Maybe green woodpeckers are a bit more choosy where they dine.  :(

It's prolly got more worms in it!

Try telling the Moles that. We've been over run with them this year. Would prefer the woodpeckers any day.

Ok, the moles have eaten all the worms so the Woodies got to go next door!

Moles are sooo cute tho!

True yes they are cute and soooooooo soft to touch but they have made a hell of a mess of our lawn and flower bed edges.

Before I joined the Post Office I spent 4 years working as a plasterer's mate. I was shovelling sand into a cement mixer one day. Grabbed a shovelful of sand from the heap & was just about to sling it in the mixer when a mole surfaced in the middle of it. He came within inches of being mixed.  :o

Is a plasterer`s mate like a fishermans friend?  ;D

Yeah, but not so friendly -or crunchy.

We get a regular crowd of pheasants calling at our garden each day. They pick up the seed that other birds drop from the bird feeding trays & occasionally the more athletic ones will hop up onto the lowest feeder & wobble about, trying to keep their balance & eat at the same time. They run free on the estate but are here to be shot during the Winter shooting season -slightly annoying after we've been fattening them up, but probably more annoying for the pheasants.
Today one of them has repaid our generosity by laying an egg below the feeders. I was all set to become a surrogate father to it, but Taz, being more hardened to country life than me, told me pheasants have had all their maternal instincts bred out over the years & simply lay eggs then abandon them. Within an hour it had been snapped up for breakfast, probably by the crows.
*Sigh* I hardly had time to bond with it.
                      -Manky -softy townie.

.

you guys are so lucky i would love to live somewhere like that where natures all around ya

Took me a while to adjust to living somewhere that's permanently muddy & a bit scruffy, but now I love it. A different lifestyle altogether. Pavements, streetlights & a convenience store open till midnight -or no shops for 2 miles in any direction, grass & pitch darkness with an unhindered view of the stars every evening. No contest.
You're very welcome to come visit Mousey Boy. Bring Jaffa Cakes. I've run out.

dont worry m8 ive already planned my journey  ;D ;D

some more photos of our visitors to bore you with  ;D

.

.

.

 And this not so wanted little chappie. It's a Cockchafer Beetle or otherwise known as a Maybug. Not much fun to get out the house once he's in so we don't go out when he's there.

fantastic pics again
love that bug aint never seen one of them before

He's got a shell as hard as a bullet & headbutts the window, attracted by the light. Quite spooky.

squash the little bugger

Not seen a Maybug since I was little, ugly buggers int they.

I think he'd probably thump me back if I tried to squish him.  :o

hoy dont squash him
he look like a cool bug lol  ;D

squash him!!!!!!!!!!!

We live by the woods and have all sorts of crawlies trying to get into the house.

Here are two frogs in our pond. The femail is saying, 'p*ss off with that camera'.

We get loads of those Maybugs (mostly in June!) - I hate em!  When I go outside in the evening to hang out washing they get in my hair!

But don't squash 'em cos they go off POP an it's horrid!  Eeewww!   :o

Taz called me out to the garden a couple of nights ago. There was a hell of a commotion going on. Underneath the bird feeders in the middle of the lawn was a Sparrow Hawk. It had a Starling pinned to the ground & the poor thing was shrieking it's head off. We watched, stunned, not knowing quite what to do -try & intervene or keep well out of the way -I wouldn't argue with a p*ssed off, hungry hawk. Thankfully it lost it's grip & the Starling shot off, over the hedge & away. Hopefully it survived & didn't drop dead of shock in next door's garden.
We've seen these hawks in the garden a couple of times now but that's the first time we've witnessed a successful strike. It just appeared from nowhere, silent & absolutely deadly. Happened far to quick to grab a camera. We put out food to attract the smaller birds, but the birds of prey obviously think we put out smaller birds for them!
   

whenever the hawk appears round here the skies go very quite not a bird to be seen for miles lol
and it takes ages for um to re appear

We get a few buzzards and hawkey/buzzardy/eagley/falcony thingys around here too. It does go deathly silent, birds hiding anywhere that they can fit.
When the buzzardy thingies come around the rooks from the rookery at the back of us gang up on them and drive them off. The seagulls do the same too, and they can't half fly, aerobatics and all!!!!
It's brill watching the buzzards using the thermals , just climbing higher and higher.

Last year Mrs. K heard a bang on the roof, thinking that something had fallen on it she looked out of the bedroom to see a hawky thingy with a starling. It was having its lunch, the hawky thingy, not the starling
 ::) ::)
Mrs K was quite upset coz the starlings around here are very friendly and don't get spooked when we go into the garden. They just look at us, see no threat and carry on looking for grubs and things.
We are a little mad and talk to them too. They look at us and then carry on feeding. They don't fly off unless we get too close, about three feet away. Which is so cool.
Mrs. K banged on the window to try and save the starling but the hawky thingy just gave her a look of disgust, you know the one, like the one you get when you go into a posh shop and buy something that's not expensive enough. :o :o

This bird was about eighteen inches tall, I don't know much about birds (feathered or not) and Mrs K was too busy trying to scare it off (without going outside and eally making it angry!!!!) to take a piccy.
Even with a pic I would be hard pressed to identify it.
Anyone know what it might have been? How big is a sparrow hawk?
Shame really for the starling but that's nature I suppose.
Regards
K

Out for a walk on the Purbeck hills one day I saw a family of buzzards - a pair of adults and three young ones who were having flying lessons.  Yep, they were doing circuits and bumps!  The adults were encouraging then to take off on the steep hillside, then they were flying out in a circle across the valley, coming back, landing, then doing it all again!

The commonest bird of prey to see in your garden is a sparrowhawk - as the name suggests they go after small birds.  They're also very noisy so if you see a bird of prey flying around and calling that's prolly a sparrowhawk too.  Buzzards are much bigger and instead of the pointy wings of the sparrowhawks they have broad wings with feather spread out like fingers at the wingtips.

Sparrowhawk http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/newpage1.htm (http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/newpage1.htm)

Buzzard http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/buzzard-2.htm (http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/buzzard-2.htm)

Here are some photos of mummy Starling feeding her chick.

.

aint they noisy little buggers when they want feeding  ;D

They're nesting in our loft. We can hear the little buggers running about up there & every time the water tank fills up they go beserk. Taz has lived in this cottage for the best part of 10 years & hasn't dared look in the attic yet. I dread to think what's living up there.

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

There could be an old Vincent up there for all you know.

This is our latest kitten Tabbs ( Scabbers ) in his favorite spot.

The old crone we used to live next door to had a bird table that also attracted grey squirrels,it was great watching not one but two hawks use it as a cafe

I wandered downstairs the other morning to find the patio outside our back door awash with peanuts, seed & fat nibbles. A right mess. Taz had caught the culprits red handed though.
We kept the bird food in a large plastic tub. These 2 baby squirrels had managed to break into it & were happily stuffing themselves. I think the robin was acting as look out.