Thursday 11 April 2013

THE RODENTS RETURN




Surprisingly ,through our the whole of this long hard winter not a single rat has been seen in the gardens or the garth,until this week.
I am not sure what the attraction is,it cannot be the bird food we put pout daily or they would certainly visit us in the winter when food is scarce , so why come now?

We are still waiting for the work on the out buildings to be completed so there is nothing in the sheds to attract them,it,s a mystery. Pa thinks that it may be because our two cats are staying indoors at the moment. I think that perhaps it is due to the fact that the Tom cats chorus has been much less in evidence of late,whatever the reason they are back!

On Tuesday evening I got a shot off at a big male rat,I am a good shot,the rat did not suffer,it's a job I hate but having been brought up on a farm I know the importance of keeping rat numbers down, not only for the damage they do but for the disease with they carry,even so I have found myself unable to shoot the baby rats that congregate around the bird bath to drink,they are just too damned cute!

I dislike the idea of using poison as I fear the accumulative effect it can have upon foxes, cats and other creatures who kill them for food, over all I think a clean quick shot is best .If a fox, a crow or any carrion eater finds and eats one it will not harm their young or themselves.

Moth continues to recover from her operation and has now completed her course of antibiotic,Twiggy,in a towering rage and has spent all day sulking in my room. Aggression between them is oddly spasmodic so a cause is difficult to trace. We shall have to persevere with these two stubborn females I can see. Hormones can be the very devil.

My son is tonight attending a meeting to discuss further work to be done on the River Crane,this river was deliberately flooded with effluent two years ago when problems developed with the drains at Heathrow Airport. It seems that the fine for polluting ,not only the River Crane but the Duke of Northumberland's River at Silverhall, and The River Thames at Isleworth, (an area only just beginning to recover from a similar event some years before) was much much less than those which Thames Water would have faced had they chosen not to pollute the river

This discrepancy in the amount of the fine for such behaviour is at the root cause of many of out problems with river and land pollution, and it is well past the time when the seriousness of such irresponsible decisions was acknowledged by a greater equality in the punishment.

Finally I feel that I must mention the passing of Margaret Thatcher, but since it is not done to speak ill of the dead I shall refrain from doing so here.











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