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Goodbye Cuckoo, Hello Badger
It is April 24th and I have still not heard a cuckoo in my garden. They are elsewhere in Sussex but not here in this valley. They were calling the day my daughter was born in 1992 but now she is revising for A Levels they are gone.
Luckily I still have bees, bumbling in and out of the fritillaries and getting trapped in the conservatory. I rescue them with a tea-towel; smother them for a second and then release. They hiss momentarily at imprisonment and then bumble away.
The weather has been good for spring flowers. Fairwarp is awash with celandines, violets and primroses. They love the cool damp air cut through with bursts of sun.
But one night this week a terrible act of vandalism took place. It was like “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Mr Badger saw my lush trimmed lawn and said “We’ll soon put a stop to that”. And I say “we” because it simply couldn’t have been the work of one lonesome badger. It was a case of “come on lads, let’s see what you are made of, tonight I’m going to show you how to dig”. So the entire badger clan march in to uproot my lawn. Every plantain was dug out, every errant weed up-rooted. All they left behind were the clods. They started the first night and the second night they finished off the job.
I am left wondering, is this it, or will they return? Like burglars were they just casing the joint for an even bigger hit?
I found a badger in the dining room once. He must have gone down to the cellar for a warm up and taken the wrong exit.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.