Selfsufficientish.com

Millymollymandy wrote:Those are great photos smwon (how do you pronounce that?!! ).

Smwon is pronounced 'Someone'. Originally it stood for 'Small Wonders', but then someone told me they thought it stood for 'someone' and so it's been someone ever since.

smwon wrote:

Green Rosie wrote:We are really lucky here -

And the house is overrun with mice, voles and shrews

Now that would be a sight to see! NOT! Although I see enough evidence of that myself!

We have something that squeeks really loudly from a corner in the kitchen from about 10pm every night. Interestingly neither the dogs nor the cat seem to be able to head it .

Younger dog is an expert mouser though, and when our rodent co-habitors run underneath the floorboards she gets very excited and tries to dig the floor up

[quote="Green Rosie"]We are really lucky here - we regularly see deer, hares, buzzards, loads of small birds, adders, frogs and toads etc.

Ditto
We also regularly have a family of Wild boar cross the land to get to the Maize, and down in the river we have Ragadan ( not sure about spelling) but it looks like large muskrat any way they do a lot damage to the crops, and of course in summer we the Lizards, Cicadas and lots of Bats.

Ragondin is French for coypu.

Thanks Someone!

Thank you MMM I never was very bright and if it was'nt for the spell check, can't spell either.

Millymollymandy wrote:Ragondin is French for coypu.

Thanks Someone!

You are welcome MMM...

Ok what is coypu? Oops... sorry it is like a large muskrat oldfella said. Some animals must be indigenous to the part of the world you live in huh? I know living in the western part of the US and by the river we have lots of varied wildlife... otters, beavers, ducks, geese and of course many others. We get a lot of precipitation in the fall, winter and spring, but then it is dry as a bone all summer... so we have lizards. Oh and we also have snakes... ewww! I really dislike snakes! We have black bears, got a picture of one last summer about a mile up the river from us. My fiancé is a gold miner so he dredges in the river… the bears will bite and tear up his plastic totes, hoses for the dredge, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The old house, which we just moved from, the bears, crossed our back yard regularly. We also have mountain lions although I have not seen any yet (and that’s ok by me!), there is also bobcat and those my fiancé has seen, but I haven’t been privileged to see them yet. Living in the mountains in Northern California (Siskiyou mountain range), Jim often looks on Google Earth and finds little used roads. We take rides up in the mountains following them; some have not been traversed in years. We see many different species of wildlife. We both find this very enjoyable to do.

I get a couple of foxes around the hen house. They set the security light off. I have a couple of squirrels in the trees at the bottom of the garden that keep the cats amused. In the pond there are loads of frogs that are actively creating frog spawn at the moment. We get loads of birds around here and my neighbour said he saw a woodpecker recently. Not bad for a residential area close to the centre of town.

Where I used to work we saw deer and rabbits on the grass out the front of the office regularly.

Zoe

aarrgh I was right in the middle of typing and pressed something on my (new) keyboard and I lost the lot!

So briefly here's info on the coypu, it was introduced from South America and is considered a pest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutria

I prefer muskrats and 'our' muskrats had two babies last summer who'd come up on the banks of the lake to eat grass right in front of us, so long as we sat still. Was a fantastic sight to see.

However our wildlife, whether native or introduced, doesn't tend to be of the very scary variety. Like deadly snakes and bears!

That's interesting, scroll down that Wiki page to the maps - coypu have been eradicated from California. How do they stop them crossing state boundaries?

Thanks for the info on coypu… I have never seen this ‘rat’ before. And yes it does say it’s been eradicated from California. Who knows how, unless it was via the border agricultural check points. They only work now for semi trucks, but it used to be everyone had to stop. Perhaps it was through these means that they prevented them coming again into California… that’s just a guess.