Nature Notes

Last night, I noted the slugs are getting thinner and smaller, oozing less slime on the-impossible-to-slide-along doormat in the dark. Their season of high carnality is drawing to a chilly close.  They had had a Vintage Year.

A wood frog sat on the green imitation grass unmoving, its bony green and yellow back to me, blinded by my solar torch beam.  Something screeched in the wood. I heard owls hooting in the farthest trees.

This afternoon, I sat in our "wild garden".  Tiny birds zoomed almost through my space, leaving the wood, on their familiar expressway. A robin sat on the fence oblivious to me, not expecting me to be there and then saw me and flew off.

A squirrel scrabbled up the fence and then up the old pine.  Like a diver on a high board, he was taking his long run to dive, head first, all skill, into the wood, when he saw me and screamed - in human terms. It was a warning to the whole woodland

"HUMANS ARE IN OUR INTERSECTION.....GET THEM OUT...."

He sat up there for minutes, entirely put off his giant leap, not knowing what to do, glowering down on me, with his brown and lustrous eye.

Then he came down. Suddenly I saw him raised to his full height of about 9 inches, looking down at me from the fence post, his white underbelly on show.  So I said to him "Yes I know: I am going soon".  He must learnt patience.

It was clear to me what the message was:  "Go away. This place is ours...This is our between worlds...."

At the intersection of humanity and the wood, there do seem to be "talking" if rather unNarnian animals.