"Wild Thing" - Troggs, 1966

Life in an English village in the countryside has some distinct advantages. One of them is that we sometimes have some interesting wildlife in and around our house. Over this past weekend, we had two new visitors.

One was a hedgehog! I'd never seen one live and in person before. John spotted him/her poking around in our back garden Friday night when the security light came on. I grabbed a camera but only managed one terribly out-of-focus shot out of one of the upstairs windows...

That's the little hedgehog there in the upper center of the photo, next to one of the legs of the bird table.

In order to aid in the identification of this creature for my non-UK readers, here's another photo of a hedgehog, taken by somebody else under much better conditions...

Cute, huh? And John tells me that they eat all kinds of pests in the garden.

And if that wasn't enough "nature" for one weekend, very early this morning we were awakened by the loud sound of an owl outside our bedroom window! We didn't see it, but it was certainly there. John has done some research on the web today, and we're pretty sure it was a Tawny Owl because of the calls we heard it make.

No, Janet, you certainly aren't in Houston anymore!

Janet

PS After thinking about this posting overnight, I have realized that I should have also linked two of John's postings about the interesting woodpeckers that we've see in the garden. So one of them is here, and the other is here. Happy reading/viewing!