Campbell's Grass Snake

Moth pretending to be a birch twig

You never know what you might see at Campbell’s Cottage.

Wild goats are old hat and just recently a family of tawny owls has been keeping us awake. A bank vole has been feeding at the bird table which explains why we’ve been seeing stoats.

And in the greenhouse the other day a massive grass snake at least three feet long. If you think I’m exaggerating have a look at this film clip.

Tawny owls revenge

Five evenings ago a young tawny owl was pushed and shoved out of the enormous Scots pine beside the house. A pair of crows, that nest at the top of the tree, dived onto the ball of fluff and feathers until Molly (our dog) and I chased them off. The bedraggled owl scrambled through the wire fence and crash landed into reeds below where once again the crows attacked. By the time we got there it was lying on the ground, exhausted, barely able to keep its eyes open. But when I approached, it gathered enough strength to fly fifty metres or so into the refuge of a nearby willow. We watched for a while and it seemed the crows had either not seen or lost interest.

Later that night there were two baby tawny owls crying out for food by the railway track at Campbell’s Platform. The next night they were a couple of hundred metres up the line. On the third night there were definitely three of them and I was able to stand in the middle of a triangle of trees as they pleaded to be fed. On the fourth night they were a bit further into the nature reserve and, maybe because it was a bit overcast and misty, the owlets started calling out much earlier, at about 7:30.

Last night we sat on our warm, midge-free balcony; it was bright and balmy and not until nine o’clock that we started to hear them, faint and far away to begin with. But by the time we’d gone to bed, the owls had moved into the same Scots pine, in the middle branches next to our open window, and were in full voice non-stop till dawn. This morning the crow family was looking just a bit tired!

Bleating Sheep on Air Force One

I was chatting with a visitor to Campbell’s Cottage - the night before he’d been watching Harrison Ford in Air Force One and was a bit disconcerted to hear bleating sheep on board. It’s that time of year when the sheep and their lambs are moved off the bottom fields to make way for the cattle. The lambs keep losing their mums and this is what it sounds like:

Mixed in with the sounds of the sheep are the calls of hungry tawny owlets. On these long summer days they start crying out for food long before it gets dark. This is what they look like in daylight: