It’s been an energetic sort of day with a lot of memorable moments. As soon as I lifted the kitchen blind I saw the first parent of the year, a frantic-looking sparrow a-top the ash pile, stuffing something into the gape of a fat youngster. There were some welcome visitors that we don’t see every day – the woodpecker came in for a late lunch, hanging horizontally on the cone peanut feeder, whilst I’ve just seen the wren working through the foliage around the stone steps. However, the rarest sight was a beautiful song thrush which came to drink in the tray below the hedge motel.
Another garden resident has taken up most of our attention. Going out to scatter the seed, I found unfamiliar scat on the grass and then, rather alarmingly, saw a hedgehog sitting beside the little pot of hedgehog biscuits that I’d put next to the top water tray. We’d thought that we had a hibernating hedgehog in a brush pile, but you shouldn’t see them during the day and on getting closer, I could see clusters of fat ticks clinging around its head. It was still feeding but was moving very slowly.
I got a pair of thick gardening gloves, picked it up and put it into a box with a dish of water, a warm wheat bag wrapped in a towel, with another towel over the top. A trip to the vet later he, we now know that he’s a young male and healthy apart from the debilitating effects of the ticks. Anyway, Spikey has had an injection which should eliminate the ticks and came home with medecine to be added to his food for the next three days, after which if he’s brighter I can release him back into the garden again. He’s already tried to escape from the lower box I put him into to try to get him to eat the chicken catfood with the medecine on it and he has surprisingly long legs. Anyway, I’ve put him back into a deeper box, with a reheated wheat bag, his doctored food, water and some new shredded paper to get lost in. We may have to try an alternative flavour of catfood.
thekitchensinkbirdwatcher 