I usually say that May is my favourite month but cold weather has delayed blossom, birds and butterflies to such an extent that this year June is feeling as fresh as May, even though we’re not just nine days from midsummer.
I’m trying to focus on natural history this summer and to try and keep my main sketchbook – an 8×8 inch square spiral bound Amelie watercolour paper Pink Pig – as a nature journal but I do need a pocket-sized sketchbook for when we’re dashing about on errands, so this morning I started an A6 landscape Hahneműhle Watercolour book which is a sturdily bound hardback, so it slips into my little art bag more easily than a spiral bound version would.
There isn’t a handy bench in the library garden, so I’m trying a new pocket-sized (if you’ve got an extra-large pocket, that is) folding foam mat. It’s never going to replace my folding chair for comfort but it will just about do for ten minutes sitting on the concrete paving slabs, resting my back against one of the raised beds.
Fox Scat
It was a plastic plant label from our Musselborough leeks left lying in the middle of the back lawn that made me suspect that we’d had a fox in the garden. What else would take such an interest in a plant label?
Today we’ve got conclusive evidence of its presence with a dark, curled fox scat that has appeared overnight in the corner of the lawn by the pond.
Over the past week or so we’ve noticed a few fresh scrapes – about teacup size – mainly in the veg beds but also in the wood chip path.
One morning two weeks ago, shortly after we’d laid down a thick layer of wood chip on the path by my little meadow area, we saw a magpie eating carrion. We found the remains of a brown rat – by then just the vertebra were left, picked clean by the magpie – and we now think that it’s likely that this had been cached by the fox.
