Natural Things

Some beauty in nature to share with you for my second post of the day.

Last week, my hubby had just dropped our neighbour off at the train station and he found a baby squirrel on the ground, that had obviously fallen out of its nest. Being far too soft-hearted, he brought it home! I would have left it for its mother to find, and however sweet and furry they are, they are still rather a pest, not being indigenous to our islands and driving our native red squirrels to near extinction, and also causing quite a lot of damage to the trees. However, once he’d brought it home, we had the responsibility of looking after it, but I told him that we were neither equipped, or experienced, to deal with this on a long-term basis, and a solution must immediately be found.

Heart-melting, isn’t it.

It really was the sweetest little thing. We gave it some milk from a syringe and it simply guzzled it down – it was clearly very hungry and thirsty – and then made a bed for it with an old towel in our cat basket and put it in a different room where the cats wouldn’t find it, and kept feeding it every few hours, and in the meantime, we both did some online research until we found a squirrel rescue place. Our first attempts at contacting the volunteers in our area that this place recommended were not successful, and I was worried about long-term commitment, looking after this baby.

However, eventually a more qualified person was found, and the next day my hubby took it off to its new home.

We were told that it was a female, approximately five weeks old. Cow’s milk was apparently not the best thing for it, but it had done pretty well and we’d probably saved its life, but it is now in a better environment and being fed more suitable food.

I told my hubby not to bring any more baby wild animals home!!!

The second “nature” pictures I wanted to show you were of some beautiful cobwebs in our garden this morning. We have now entered autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” – we’ve certainly got apples on the tree which we have started harvesting, and our late raspberries, and baby tomatoes, and the last of the rhubarb – and as for the mists, well, we’ve got those aplenty too – it’s been quite foggy here over the past couple of days.

I looked out of an upstairs window and was astonished to see a miriad of cobwebs in the garden, highlighted by tiny droplets of water from the mist, and knew I had to photograph them. I called my hubby and we went out together to look at them, and as I was “oooh! ahhh!”-ing, all he said was, “this garden’s a huge death trap!” Lol!!

I suppose there are always this many cobwebs in the garden, but most of the time we just don’t see them.

I have enhanced these photos slightly, increasing the contrast so the cobwebs show up better – they were not so good on the original photos as in real life.

Beautiful, aren’t they. It’s a wonder that the spiders know where to begin, to make these webs, suspended across quite wide spaces sometimes.