Wildlife Autumn 2007 (spring wildlife Down Under)

[Maggi Young]

If the coat owners wore them for practical purposes they would be inside out.

Can't understand how so many animals have got that wrong ,then Anthony!


What a fabulous snake and what a wonderful pose. Like a living sculpture, so perfectly placed.

[Anthony Darby]

This morning the GTP is on the other side of the wee twig, proving it does move. Must find some water resistant silk-leafy twigs to decorate the cage. Not much use being camouflaged green it the cage is white with a brown branch.

[Maggi Young]

Can't the Green Tree Python have real branches with real leaves ?

[Anthony Darby]

It has real branches, but real leaves soon go off and growing plants in any kind of substrate would introduce all sorts of pathogens. In a word, it would go fusty (pronounced foosty). Best to keep fairly sterile conditions (branches aside).

[Anthony Darby]

This pic of Badgers (Meles meles) was taken on the back patio of a colleague's house in Linlithgow, West Lothian.

[Maggi Young]

WOW! A whole family, out visiting, how marvelous. That's pretty unusual, isn't it, even in these days of urban foxes making free with  our facilities, to see badgers so close to houses?

[Anthony Darby]

We have an active badger set nearly opposite our school and 50 metres from the busy Callendar Road, the main road into Falkirk from the east. It is dug into the north side of the Antonine ditch. These Linlithgow badgers visit this garden every night.

[Carlo]

Yahoo! Go Badgers! (They are the mascot of the University of Wisconsin--my law school alma mater...). I wonder if your badger is as seldom seen as our Taxidea taxus?

[Anthony Darby]

Saw a dead one on the M9 motorway this morning. Generally they are seldom seen, unless you visit a set at about 9 p.m. and wait downwind.

[Lesley Cox]

Wonderful, wonderful badgers. To see a whole family at once must be a fantastic thing. How big are these Anthony?

Could you train your tree snake to change colour like a chameleon and be in sinc with whatever his surrounding happen to be?

[Anthony Darby]

Badgers are, well, sort of er badger sized Lesley. Maybe nearly a metre long?

[Lesley Cox]

Sorry Anthony, I thought with so many all at once like that, that they were a family of young ones, just part grown. And don't talk to me in that superior tone of voice anyway . We don't have badgers here so I've never seen a live one. I did once see a roadkill one in the UK and another, stuffed, in a pub somewhere.

After another look, I suppose the wheelbarrow gives a reasonable idea of their size. How marvellous to have them all visiting one's garden.

[Martin Baxendale]

Visiting badgers aren't always good news, Lesley - not if they decide to start excavating in your beds! I had an old brock who used to visit my garden almost every night and bulldozed his way through my plants and bulbs in an infuriatingly destructive way, looking for worms. I love badgers and love seeing them but it nearly drove me nuts trying to keep him out and finding deep holes and uprooted plants and bulbs day after day, year after year. No amount of filling gaps in hedges with netting, sticks etc. would keep him out. They're like little tanks, and can barge their way through and under anything you put in their way. He was killed by a car on the road three years ago, which was sad, but to be honest it was a relief to stop finding the holes and destruction every morning! No others from the set up the road (in someone's garden who treats them as pets) seem to ever have followed the old brock. It seemed to be his own personal nightime trail through the gardens, always exactly the same route.

[Carlo]

Just me, and I know it's romantic and naive, but if I a badger, or a cete of badgers, I'd garden AROUND them. I'd give up a fair bit of ground to have them here...

[Lesley Cox]

Me too Carlo, though it's easy for ME to say, not having the problem in the first place.