Nature notes

I start with yesterday evening, when strolling down the garden I noticed that the first autumn cyclamen are out - white dwarf variety. The white dwarf cyclamen whose corms can grow to brown giant dimensions, or at least one of ours has.

Then some green scum floating about in the marsh marigold pond caught my eye and I thought that it was perhaps time for a quick trawl with the long handled kitchen sieve, that is to say a nylon kitchen sieve with a garden cane attached to its handle. To find that the clouds of green scrum were intimately associated with clouds of wriggling larvae of some sort, maybe a couple of millimetres long with a distinct head and tail. What on earth are they? Aren't they leaving it a bit late to grow into something big enough to survive the coming winter?

Later on, we were able to observe a small fox devouring something on the back lawn. Not quite sure what it was, but it did not look big enough to be a pigeon or small enough to be a mouse. It all looked very savage, with the fox tearing whatever it was apart in the dim dusk light, despite it looking small enough to swallow whole. Much more savage than our more civilised style of wash then chill then carve with a band saw. All done cleanly, in a brightly lit clean place. Taking a look this morning there were no feathers - which I think a fox will usually leave - so maybe it was a rat. From which we deduce that foxes are not an unmitigated pain.

And having sorted out the fox, caught a juvenile frog, maybe two inches long, in the act of jumping into the reed pond. Maybe we will get some frog spawn next year, the first for a year or two.