Probable Pippistrelle

A furry stranger arrived in our garden this evening; he was found clinging upside down to a shrub. We watched as he began to scramble from twig to twig. Now and then, he would flutter a couple of feet, but couldn't quite get into the air.

Pipistrellis pipistrellis

A quick look at the small ears and nose and some leafing through my wildlife guides, I had him down as a Pippistrelle (Latin for "I squeak" - and I can confirm first-hand that they do). These little guys eat maybe two or three thousand insects in their nightly four-hour hunts, finding their prey with FM sonar - catching a fresh victim as often as every 4 seconds.

The trailing edge of his last wing seemed a little damaged; I took him from our cat-haunted garden, and left him hanging upside-down (the right way up, for a bat) from a tree.

Together, harmony

Sitting at the piano, tinkering with the motifs and fragments that might one day gel into a soundtrack, I rattle through variation after variation, evolving note by note the music I will need to accompany the landscapes playing in my memory's screening room. As a freezing desert and a distant mountain range float before my eyes, I search higher into the treble, trying for the phrases that will wrap the chill of distant glaciers around my viewer's skin.

Suddenly, an unexpected chord lifts me from the frozen wastes and drops me back in a cosy sitting room, where a warm weight, 11 kilos or so, rests on my lap; the chord sounds again, and I look down at the keys past a huge mop of blonde hair. Two chubby little index fingers descend again, and the chord rises for the third time. Then, a really gappy imitation of a scale... two huge blue eyes look up at Dad, and a huge gappy smile rewards my applause. 13 months old!

p.s. I love being a Dad

Not getting wrecked

I wish I had read this post a couple of months ago. Reader, you cannot be too-well moored.

Time traveller?

Who is Alex Boote?

Rescue

My wife bellowed, then shot past the window, accelerating so fast that she assumed a reddish tint. I followed her out, and found her standing in front of the gate which guards our neighbour's yard, faced off against our very angry cat. Behind the gate, a very frightened juvenile starling huddled against a wall, shivering. No wonder: apart from being soaked in cat saliva, each and every tail-feather had been extracted from a now-naked behind.

Manouevering carefully to keep myself between the bird and any effective cover, I raced to catch it, expecting at any moment to be overtaken by the assassin (now using the cover of a high wall, to attempt a flanking manoeuvre). The little starling hopped and fluttered away from me for a few yards, then became hopelessly entangled in a dwarf pine - ouch! Seconds later, it was secured (in a former cat-carrier, the one we used for our cat (Sox) until he developed the muscle to simply shoulder his way through the door).

~

Google got me some key bird facts: starlings need lots of protein, and birds generally tail-feathers regrow in 4-6 weeks, their loss being a common defensive mechanism. I read that minus tail-feathers, flight should still possible (which made sense - not much survival value in sacrificing a tail if you have to walk away afterwards). Excellent news.

~

Our violently shivering little patient enjoyed a couple of hours resting and warming up in protective custody (our shed); fortunately for its peace of mind, it couldn't see our rascally cat as he tried, in succession, to tunnel through shed floor, to pry the doors open, to deglaze the windows. The would-be murderer was preparing to peel back the roof when I removed the patient to my car, and took off at speed, braking hard once or twice to shake any furry fiends from the undercarriage, and following up with a few hand-brake turns, just in case he was pursuing in another vehicle.

In a quiet lay-by between a small river and some exceptionally beautiful parkland, I put the cat box on the ground and opened the door for a flight test. With no homes close by, I could assume there weren't too many lurking housecats, and with plenty of bare ground, a flightless bird could easily be recaptured, while a flying one could soon reach good cover and good hunting. There was a momentary pause: then, with an explosion of beating wings, the patient shot from the box, and made an almost immediate lift off, climbing in a straight and steady line to a perch in a nearby a tree. The thrill of flight was amazing, as if I had taken to the air myself. I stayed a minute at the tree-lined river bank, enjoying the golden light of early sunset on the mass fresh green foliage and the warmth of a June evening; and then I drove home, to be sulked at by my rascally cat.

The Wrecking of Briongloid

The call came late in the evening from an unfamiliar number; a voice I had never heard before told me that Briongloid (Irish for "dream") was hard aground the rocks outside her home cove. Several hurried phone calls later, I was on the road to the coast, racing through the darkness in convoy with a hastily press-ganged brother-in-law, trying beat the water to our precious boat, and take the salvage opportunity presented by the approaching high tide.

A few miles down the road, the dash was ended by another call; a crew from a local boatyard had got her off. Too late to do any good now, we turned for home.

~

The next day, I saw her. Back on the trailer she had left so recently, her bottom paint still brush-fresh, but her hull now sadly battered, the smooth swell of her hull now sadly gouged and scraped, with cracks that penetrated the hull below the waterline. The rudder, refurbished mere weeks ago, smashed to matchwood, only fragments remaining attached to the gudgeons and the tiller. Inside, the flexing of her hull had cracked the interior. Below, a sinister crack ran right around the keel.

Not good.

Columba livia domestica

Our resident lap-warmer and dog-scarer was waiting at the door for his breakfast, wearing his most winning "poor starving cat" expression. The performance would've been much more convincing if he had remembered to clean his blood-soaked face...

It wasn't his blood; our back garden looked as though a lunatic anatomist had been doing his dissection al fresco. A blood-mad killer he may be, but he does very neat work, tidily discarding offal like the stomach and intestines. On this morning, he had dismantled a racing pigeon (his largest prey to date, owing to an unfortunate local scarcity of Struthio camelus). The unfortunate bird (hailing from a loft in Dublin city) had been carefully butchered by his experienced claws, the wings neatly jointed, and the head set off to one side as a trophy.

The most interesting anatomical feature remaining was the rib cage, picked as clean as a whistle, which allowed me to get a really good look at the keel, a high thin ridge of bone which projects from the centre of the chest, running vertically along the centre line. The size of this bone (I estimate it stood about 30mm proud of the rib-cage proper) indicated the huge size of the (since devoured) muscles - the living engines that can propel a pigeon through the sky at 45 miles per hour, for many hundreds of miles. Fantastic creatures.