What birthday card do you get for someone who’s just passed their HGV?
Hedgehogs go Viral
Tag: Hedgehog
Lucky the Hedgehog
Arkan Sonney, the Isle of Man’s lucky hedgehog, makes a return appearance, along with his chums Moddey Dhoo a.k.a. the Black Dog of Peel Castle and the Buggane, everyone’s favourite Manx bogeyman, on another of this week’s homemade cards.
Jill Nalder
Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.
Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.
New Class at the Woodland School
Summer is over, it's turning cool, It's time to go back to the Woodland School . . . Owl seems to be sleeping, but I've a hunch, He's dreaming of Dormouse for his lunch. Just one missing, and that's the Mole, Whoa! Here he comes now, popping up from his hole!
A birthday card for Florence (she’s the one in the woolly hat).
Garden Shed
We found a fresh hedgehog dropping this morning, on the end slab of the top of the low retaining wall of herb bed, nearest to the house. Less welcome, but seemingly inevitable, 
Barbara says she’s also spotted rat droppings as she edged the lawn. Yesterday our next door neighbours found a dead one at the end of their garden.
Biscuit, the pony with attitude, hasn’t made an appearance in my sketchbook recently. Apparently he has been sold. If Biscuit had been a player on my team, he would definitely have been up for free transfer. But I’ll miss him.
Latest from the blue tit box on the patio; blue tits were in and out of it a couple of weeks ago. A house sparrow briefly investigated it but 
all we’ve seen in the last week is an occasional bumble bee hovering by the entrance hole and going inside.
For the first time in forty years as a freelance I got my accounts started, finished and even submitted my tax return online in just one day. They’re simple enough – working out the proportion of printing costs against book sales is as complicated as it gets – 
but in previous years there always seemed to be one mystery item that would hold me up.
Now I haven’t got that hanging over me, perhaps I’ll feel more freedom to get off and draw.
Frogfest
I looked out the other day and there were at least twelve frogs in the pond. Today I counted nine clumps of frogspawn. Usually the spawn is laid at the shallow, sunnier end of the pond. This year it’s all at the overgrown, deeper end, partially shaded by the shed.
Since I wrote this, my neighbour 
Jack across the road has offered me a bucket of spawn which he always clears from his tiny pond. I don’t really need any more but I’d rather take it because otherwise he’d put it in the stream, which is fast flowing so it would just get flushed away into the river. I’m trying to work out if I can fit in a mini-pond or two into the odd corner of my garden as I know ponds have been filled in in adjacent gardens and the frog population will soon start struggling.
Hedgehog Dropping
On a mossy patch of back lawn near the pond there’s a single hedgehog dropping and, a foot or so from that, a clayey fox scat with the typical pointed end.
Pondweed
AFTER CLEARING the pond last week and leaving the water to clear we’re now adding ten weighted bunches of oxygenating Curled Pondweed, Potamogeton crispus. I’m thinking carefully before I choose the floating and emergent plants that we’re going to add next as I don’t want to introduce anything which will completely take over the pond as the Yellow Flag Iris did.
The evening after we’d cleared the pond and cut down some of the surrounding vegetation, we watched a Hedgehog snuffling around the pond edge. It waddled over to the garden shed to search amongst the grasses before disappearing under the hawthorn hedge into next door’s garden.
Snails are a regular part of a hedgehog’s diet but the empty and broken shells that we find on concrete paths in our garden are the result of another snail-eater which we’ve been seeing quite often recently; the Song Thrush. A week or two ago it came up to 
the patio with two youngsters. It may have nested in the ivy in the far corner beyond the greenhouse or in one of our next door neighbour’s dense evergreen shrubs.
Sadly another young Greenfinch collided with the patio windows on Sunday afternoon. We heard the bang. Sometimes the bird is dazed but it survives but this one was unlucky and apparently broke its neck on impact. The windows were open at the time but unfortunately it flew into the glass instead of flying into the house.