Suffolk Wildlife  

The little owls are still with us and one can be seen sitting in the sun in his doorway most bright afternoons.  At dusk they sometimes become very vocal if I whistle from the garden.  It does not sound a friendly Hello they're shouting back at me. 

Most of last summer we were free of jackdaws, a pair of crows arrived and all the rooks and jackdaws left.   The crows were a great bother, we think they lived on guinea fowl eggs as we never found any eggs and there was no sign of rats.  One of the crows started attacking our windows at dawn  One day there was blood on the glass from the top of the window to the ground.  I had expected to find a dead crow but he was back two hours later!  While the crows were here we had visits from magpies and a jay. When the crows went the rooks and jackdaws came back but in smaller numbers than before.

All the small birds were missing until a few weeks ago.  The wrens came back first and they are everywhere.  Two very large woodies are eating all the berries with a couple of blackbirds getting the low ones.  If the redwings come this year the berries will have gone but it must be three years since we had flocks of redwings, a friend in Berkshire has had her normal huge numbers visiting.

We still have green woodpeckers regularly clearing an ant’s nest near the house and there are still two or three rabbits.  Our guinea fowl give them a mighty peck, which makes them run.  The woodpecker got a peck yesterday.  A water hen is hanging about, we have one or two most winters.

We've had a ‘dig’ in our garden to uncover the Roman road.  We knew something was there as the site is marked on maps and a garden fork only goes in four inches.  It's interesting to see this quite shallow strip of hard packed sandy small gravel the correct width with ditches both sides.  One ditch has been filled with rubbish, probably filled in to make a water soak away pit from the old Mill granary and office.  We wonder where the Romans got the gravelly soil from, it is an orange colour.

I think a fox came through this afternoon.  Something set the guinea fowl shouting and then the cockerel and some pheasants.  I could follow something travelling along the hedge by the alarms from the blackbirds and many other birds in the next field.  As the bird alarms grew fainter our neighbours farm dogs started to bark nearly half a mile away.  I hope the fox went home without a hen or goose, it got three of our young hens a month ago.

Jean Vincent

 Autumn 2005