Wildlife at Clacheranmor

As well as the bird spotting, also very exciting has been several visits from a pine marten. Something we had never seen before in real life, despite knowing they were around (they had spent some time nesting noisily in Heather and Dave's roof space). We stood mesmerised the first time as the little guy wandered round the garden searching for food, checking out the bird feeders, and eventually leaving with (I think) a frog in its mouth. It has been back a few times and it's always a delight to see it.

Thanks to the novelty of having a pond in the garden we have enjoyed finding newts in and around the water, and have been surprised by occasionally finding them in the borders whilst weeding. We are being very careful with them as we love having them around. As far as I can tell they are palmate newts.

If you have the sound up for the video you can hear the frogs croaking!

The newts, however, are not good news for the tadpoles, seeing as tadpoles make up a good portion of the newt diet. And this year we had thousands of tadpoles in the pond. The entire surface of the water was covered in frogspawn one morning, after listening to the frogs croaking (gettig it on) for about a week. I was so excited to chart the progress of the tiny spawn and spent the next three weeks anxiously googling 'how can I tell if frogspawn is alive' as the innards didn't seem to be growing and the spawn went milky. I thought the whole lot had been lost to a late freezing of the pond, despite going out and removing the ice from the surface. Then, miraculously, they hatched and I followed their progress for the next couple of weeks while they very slowly grew in size. I was thrilled. We went away for a weekend and when we got back I was upset to see them all thrashing around in a couple of inches of water at the bottom of the pond. We have realised that the pond does not retain the water and if it doesn't rain we need to top it up using the hose. The owners before Adam and Emma knew this and have buried a hose across the garden to the pond for this purpose. We have also since found out that Adam tried to line the pond with a special lining clay, but this has failed. Anyway, we topped the pond up and then promptly went away again, and the next time we returned the pond was as dry as a Jacob's cream cracker and sadly devoid of all life. So, our task for later this year is to sort out a pond liner in the hope we can sustain the pond life at Clacheranmor next year.

The red squirrels continue to visit our nut feeders on an almost daily basis. When we first moved in we had one orange coloured squirrel that often came to eat and bury the nuts all over the garden. Soon after a darker reddy-black version joined and we enjoyed them sometimes chasing each other round and jumping from tree to tree. Then, in the early spring two tiny squirrels appeared - one orange and one a darker red. We were thrilled at the thought of a family of squirrels in our area. I looked out one morning and squinted at the squirrel-proof bird feeder wondering what on earth was going on, and my heart almost stopped when I realised a baby squirrel was trapped inside. I was just getting ready to run to the rescue when it did a couple of circuits inside and then extracted itself easily enough. We saw it do that a couple more times until, presumably, it got too big. And then the unthinkable happened whilst we were away - mum and dad reported that Flo dragged one into the house, through the catflap. The poor little thing was stiff when we saw it, with tiny paws together as if begging for its little life. We are still devastated by this loss. We stopped feeding them for a couple of weeks, and they stopped visiting. We missed them so much we have recently given in and topped up the nuts and bought a collar with a bell on, but we don't think the cats will tolerate this, having never worn a bell before. We will monitor the danger and see how it goes.