My Garden and Other Animals. Mike Dilger
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up the water flow and perturb the bed, but this was in reality little more than piecemeal and had had little effect.
As the discussion turned to our garden, I excitedly gabbled about both the grand plans and the impressive list of birds we had already attracted to our feeders in the short time since moving in, before turning to the subject of how frustrated I was beginning to get with the bullying tactics of the squirrels. Dennis and Marjory had themselves encountered the same problems, until they had invested in special cage feeders designed to keep the squirrels at bay, and which had seemingly nipped the problem in the bud. Having not encountered anywhere near this level of mammalian feeder disturbance in Bristol, where the squirrels’ appearances were usually more novelty than irritation, it was obvious that my old feeders were now patently not up to the job and I would have to invest in some more!
Apparently I was not the first of Dennis’s next-door neighbours to have had this issue and he asked if I had heard about Mr Gregory’s battle with squirrels. Realising from my quizzical face that patently I hadn’t, he recounted how Mr Gregory had so detested their aggressive and domineering tactics that he had taken it upon himself to initiate a shooting and trapping campaign during his last few years in the house, claiming in the process a grand total of 212 squirrel scalps! What made the anecdote even more hilarious was that Lorraine (the neighbour to our other side) positively encouraged the squirrels into her garden and so was mortified to find her furry friends being so ruthlessly wiped out just over the garden fence. This meant that in order not to fall out with his neighbour, Mr Gregory had limited his operation to either night-time or when Lorraine was out at work – what a character!
Armed with all the correct tools, Christina and I quickly made short work of the fence line, as we firstly removed the wire rabbit-guard stapled to the front, then prised away the wooden rails with the borrowed crowbar and finally wiggled the posts free of their concrete footings. Standing back to admire our handiwork, the garden looked a touch strange without the one obstacle that had prevented the wildlife wandering freely between the wooded bank and the rest of the garden. Importantly, though, the garden and brook had now become one, and it was one more job off the list, too!
Stacking the wood behind the garage, we retreated to the kitchen for Christina to make a quick cuppa and for me to quickly catch up with how the English rugby team was doing against Italy. I had scarcely been given the chance to find out the score before hearing Christina’s urgent, shrill voice imploring me to come quickly to the kitchen. Seeing her nose pressed up against the window I followed suit, and was utterly astonished to see a male pheasant strutting around the garden as he cleared up the seed debris dropped by the tits and finches from the feeders, having obviously just strolled in via the new 15-yard wildlife entrance to the garden.
The pheasant is an introduced, and therefore in many purists’ eyes, a lesser species. Originally hailing from southeast Russia and Asia, it is thought to have been brought over to Britain by the Normans, and over time has become part and parcel of the British countryside and, in my considered opinion, a wonderful addition to our fauna too. The pheasant is also one of those species characterised by sexual dimorphism, which means that the sexes look completely different. The female pheasants often tend to be smaller, yellowy-brown and with marked flecking; colours and patterns which enable them to quickly melt into the background when incubating their clutch in spring; while the male, with his iridescent copper-coloured body, metallic green head, red facial wattles and ear tufts, could be described as a dandy with an attitude. Fatherhood is seemingly an alien concept for the male pheasant, as he plays little or no part in the rearing of his chicks. The males are more of the love ’em and leave ’em type, their sole aim being to assemble a harem of two or more females, which they will defend at all costs from other marauding males keen to chance their arm. Until they have been mated, that is, after which the males thoughtlessly abandon the females to their fate.
In our previous Bristol garden I would never have expected to see a pheasant, and even in our new garden I wouldn’t have shortened the odds that much at the chance of adding the species to my garden list. With a moment’s reflection, though, maybe its appearance shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. For starters, Chew Stoke is a small, rural village set in the countryside, and due to our street being tucked away in the southeastern corner, as the pheasant walks our garden was probably no more than a couple of hundred yards from the nearest arable fields. Hadn’t Dennis also said only a couple of hours previously that they did occasionally turn up in his garden too?
I have watched pheasants in the British countryside on thousands of occasions, so what we were looking at, in isolation, wasn’t a particularly rare sighting. But watching one on our own lawn, I can officially confirm, was a hundred times better, because it was the most glorious vindication of our policy to break down one of the main barriers to our garden. By making our border porous, the effect had been the equivalent of laying down a green carpet of invitation – with the pheasant, hopefully, being the first of many more animals to accept!
True to my word that I would seek out help for those jobs technically out of my depth, and with time of the essence before spring would be upon us, I had arranged for a tree surgeon to come around and cost up some of the urgent work Christina and I had highlighted on our initial walk around. Rob was a tree surgeon of some repute in the southwest and was proud to report a wide and varied client list, which included our future monarch at his huge Tetbury estate in South Gloucestershire. If he was considered trustworthy enough for Prince Charles’s trees then he would certainly suffice for ours! What sold Rob’s services to me even more than his royal connections was the fact that Rob was not only born and bred in Chew Stoke, but by an amazing coincidence his parents still lived just around the corner. It was always good, wherever possible, to minimise the carbon footprint by keeping it local!
As his hulking old-school Land-Rover pulled on to the drive, (surely every tree surgeon’s chariot of choice), I was unsurprised to see a stocky chap emerging with legs only marginally slimmer than the sizes of mature tree trunks, who offered a handshake that was like having your hand placed in one of those bench-top vice-clamps – and then tightened to an uncomfortable level. While I waited for the blood to return to my hand, we moved straight into the garden, with Rob immediately proving charming and immensely knowledgeable in equal measure as he wandered around our mini-arboretum dispensing pearls of wisdom
Looking at the garden with fresh eyes, it was astonishing to see how in the space of just two short weeks, the garden had well and truly turned its head towards spring. While the male hazel catkins had been out for a while, it was only now that they had matured sufficiently to unleash their smoke-like sprinkles of pollen into the air at the slightest breeze. Some of these tiny packets of genetic material would then be ensured successful pollination by being intercepted in mid-drift by the bright-red erect styles of the tiny female flowers, arising like mini-phoenixes out of the otherwise naked hazel twigs. Daffodil leaves had also begun to emerge from a bewildering variety of locations around the garden, using the early spring rays to ensure sufficient food would be produced, via the miracle of photosynthesis, to produce a flower spike later that season. But botanical pride of place on the walk round easily went to the mini drifts of snowdrops which were scattered along the wooded bank in discrete pearly-white clusters.
The snowdrop curiously is also a plant with a whole host of synonyms, such as ‘February fairmaids’ or, according to the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Tickell, the wonderfully evocative name of ‘vegetable snow’. I personally think that the most intriguing name is ‘snow piercer’, so named because of the plant’s specially hardened leaf-tips, which have evolved to break through frozen ground. Despite some botanists harbouring doubts as to whether the snowdrop is indeed a native British flower, since many seemingly wild colonies may well have begun as garden escapes, what is without doubt is that as the austerity of winter comes to an end, the plant in full bloom is a welcome sign that many more floral delights are only just around the corner.
Looking up at the oak, and contrary to my thinking that the tree was on its last legs, Rob suggested that it would in all probability still outlive me! Having said