Gembo if it's by biting I think that used to be a standard approach? Hard work on the jaws I'd imagine.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure
Wildlife lowlight of the week
(611 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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The Ettrick valley is a very nice cycle ride. The Home in Time for Tea and Long Dark Teatime of the Soul audaxes both go that way from Gala, if that's your sort of thing. Pretty sure they're in November, so liable to be cold. Teeth-chatteringly cold.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Oops, wrong wildlife thread.
Posted 5 years ago # -
A youngish looking dead badger on the Heriot-Watt Campus. No obvious signs of the cause of death. I also spotted The Kingsknowe Rat, which was freshly dead with a very obvious head injury, on the towpath at Kingsknowe earlier today. Long live The Kingsknowe Rat!
Posted 5 years ago # -
Long live the Rat!
Posted 5 years ago # -
I saw the dead Kingsknowe rat this morning. I couldn't say if it had a head injury: my observation in passing seemed to be that it didn't actually have a head...
Posted 5 years ago # -
I did a bit of weeding as the sun went down and found a dead mouse just lying there. Obviously mice die all the time. The King used to kill loads so you'd find bits but this was whole and fresh.
My eagle friend tells me red kites mostly get by on dead mice which they spot on moorland from 50m up. Quite the eyesight.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@iwrats, yeah, your red kite is basically a spruced up buzzard (smaller than a Raven).
I found a dead mouse in the stairwell when I lived in thistle street. Had it on a shovel, refuse collector picked it off the shovel and flung it in the garbage.
This set me to putting mouse bait down on the top step down to the cellar. Hilarious really as the whole place was swarming with rats, who had moved down the street when the Lyon and turnbulls auctioneers was being turned into Fishers Restaurant. Mouse bait is to rats as peanuts is to humans.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Some sort of bird of prey enjoying the farmland between Gilmerton Dykes Road and Gilmerton Station Road whilst it still can.
I'd guess it was most likely a kestrel, since that's my default guess for anything that's obviously not a buzzard, but since it wasn't hovering I'm not completely sure. It was flying back and fore, very close to the ground at times. Very light brown, almost white, colouring.
EDIT: Should obviously have been in the "highlight" thread.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Possibly unfair to call this a lowlight but I have acquired a mouseguest.
Maybe I should put the giant bag of birdseed in the hall into a tub...
Posted 5 years ago # -
@unhurt, I would. These mouse guests always start cute but they stay for weeks and then their whole family moves in with you
Posted 5 years ago # -
When we had mice eating the bird food stored in the shed I went through a phase of using a live trap, and taking them a good distance away before releasing them. But gembo is right: the whole family eventually moves in, and I'm afraid I've reverted to old-fashioned break-back traps to keep the numbers down a bit.
I don't mind them helping themselves from the ground feeder: they are, as gembo say, very cute. But when they get in the shed and start chewing the plastic tubs that the food is kept in, as well as chewing the foam handles off our garden tools to line their nests with, and for some bizarre reason chewing their way in to various plastic bottles of chemicals which can't be doing them (or anything that happens to eat them) any good, I'm afraid they have to be brought under control.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Same story all over Scotland. A ravaged land with faltering productivity is to be saved by killing non-human predators rather than looking at systemic problems.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Yeah. I follow CBA Newfoundland and Labrador on Facebook and the comments under every story about falls in species that are commercially fished are 80% "there are too many seals, they eat all the fish, we just need to kill many seals" - as though seals eating fish is bad for fish stocks but humans harvesting vast quantities can't possibly be an issue...
Posted 5 years ago # -
A seal was illegally shot on the Forth last year, somewhere up towards Stirling, because it was supposedly 'interfering' with people going after fish there with rod and line. You have to buy a licence to fish there so I suppose some people think that somehow gives them exclusive rights.
Meanwhile, in Rothiemurchus, I'm told that the trout fishery there makes as much out of charging people to come and watch the ospreys fish there as it does from charging people to catch fish for themselves. They just do it at different times of the day to eliminate conflict.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I've had a mouse running about the cooker and bench for weeks. The so called "humane" traps are awful - they just imprison the poor beast for hours and leave it looking like it's been under interrogation by the KGB. When you release them, they're likely to be taken by the next predator.
I've had good success with instant-execution traps so I set a couple, one on the bench, the other under the cooker, where it had also been running about. I tried peanut butter, which has been sure-fire.
The little *** was too smart for me though, and walked past the traps. Also my flatmate stepped on the trap in the floor - fortunately wearing slippers though it gave him a helluva fright.
Tried bird seed. It ate the spilled seed but avoided the trap. We kept on seeing it and its family scampering in different rooms.
Tried chocolate. No joy. Still scurrying around the bench and over the cooker. I'd go to the kitchen to cook and its head would be poked up above the edge of the cooker, ready for another foray.
(Meanwhile the flatmate's girlfriend came to stay for the weekend. She's paranoid about mice so he had to escort her everywhere).
In despair I got some poison traps. I really don't want to poison them for various reasons but was sick of seeing the droppings every morning on the cooker and work surface. I set one on the cooker, another behind the fridge and moved the back-breaker between the cooker and the fridge.
Next morning none of the poison had been touched but a mouse was dead in the back-breaker. He is now buried under an azalea.
No trace of mice have been seen in the kitchen since. I'm guessing there may be a family but the only bold one has been caught. Not only bold but evolved to not like peanut butter.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Mice are very random. I was des patching them with a smile on their faces with a cross section of a finger of fudge. But they started avoiding this, or so it seemed. Next outbreak, I went with peanut butter. Poison traps make them very thirsty and they chew through the dishwasher pipe looking for water. You thn get flooded slowly over time. I would chuck the poison traps.
Posted 5 years ago # -
The other thing to do is to get a cat or even just a well-dried cat turd.
Mice avoid these in a way that puts peanut butter aversion in the shade. You will hear them retreat.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I was riding in along the Seafield Moor Road this morning and a motorist coming the other way drove over a piece of cardboard near the kerb which flapped madly as he went past.
As I passed at a rather slower rate of knots I realised the driver had actually hit a male pheasant, who was flapping madly to try to escape but couldn't because its leg and/or its wing was broken.
I stopped at the next convenient driveway (past the blind bend) and got my phone out to call the SSPCA's hurt animal helpline. Then I decided to rush back in case I could help the animal at all, maybe to keep it warm or at least move it off the road. Barely two or three minutes had passed, with a number of vehicles going each way, but by the time I reached the animal I found it had already died of shock.
I'd put my phone on the deck of the torpedo while I was deciding whether to call or rescue, immediately forgot it was there, and rode off. It fell onto the road seconds later and I never even realised. So not only did I fail to save an animal today, thanks to a motorist's careless driving, plus my occasional difficulty coping with deviation from certain routines and my possibly overly-caring manner, today my phone was run over, leaving it in four very dead and irrecoverable pieces.
By the time I was on the move again, and just beyond the blind bend, a hen pheasant lay dead on the nearside of the road.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@Arellcat
There are 40 million pheasants released in Great Britain each year. No one knows exactly what fraction are killed on roads but it is high.
40 million pheasants weigh more than all of the wild birds on the island. It's a scandal in almost every aspect.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@arellcat, sad but at least you hav used up the triumvirate of bad luck. I am told huawei are selling phones for 8 pound a month all in from Tesco. I am tempted to give up my drug dealers phone and become owned by china
Posted 5 years ago # -
am tempted to give up my drug dealers phone
Say it ain't so bro.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@IWRATS, when I was young I was a passenger in the family car we swerved to avoid a pheasant, and we didn't (or couldn't) swerve enough. There was a very loud bang and a mess on the road, but we carried on our journey.
So today I was aware at the time that this was, really, just another pheasant, and that I perhaps needn't waste my time. But it was the fact that it was still alive that bothered me. As a good citizen I went back for my troubles.
No good deed goes unpunished, as my Mum would say.
Posted 5 years ago # -
@Arellcat
The director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery once hit a pheasant while riding his high-powered Ducati motorcycle. Broke every bone in his left hand and catapulted him into a ditch.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Also my flatmate stepped on the trap in the floor - fortunately wearing slippers though it gave him a helluva fright.
@Rosie - sorry to laugh at your flatmate's trauma, but this is a great image.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Mice don't like to live where there are rats. I used to supply 'rat bombs'(sections of old tights with fragrant pet rat bedding tied into them) to various tenement-dwelling friends back in the day to discourage mouses from setting up home.
Posted 5 years ago # -
A very young (day old?) mallard duckling swimming in circles on the canal near Kingsknowe this evening. No sign of a parent or any other ducklings.
It is not long for this world, I fear.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Squished hedgehog on Oxgangs Road this morning :(
Haven't seen one of those in ages. It was on the tactile paving opposite the pedestrian refuge, but had obviously been run over in the carriageway and moved, either by human agency or animal (my guess would be scavenging corvids). The impact point was clearly within the advisory cycle lane, which is ironic considering that it's the one such cycle lane I know of that drivers almost always seem to stay out of (other than for parking). The central hash marks seem to be more of a draw to the majority of drivers on that road.
I just hope it wasn't some sick individual choosing to deliberately run it down.
I shall also have to keep a good eye on my hedgehog feeding station over the next few days. Hopefully the rate of consumption of cheap doggy kibble will not be noticeably diminished.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Sightings of dead animals on roads is kind of mixed news. If you see a lot, perhaps it means the population is healthy. The decline of the hedgehog in the UK is really sad, and we mainly see it via the lack of dead bodies on the roads.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Mink under canal bridge between Ratho and Gogar
Posted 5 years ago #
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