Sunday 17 August 2014

Of Rain and Tiny Creatures

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It’s been raining quite a lot over the past week, but on Friday afternoon I managed to get out for a while in a break between the clouds.

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I’ve not seen a lot of butterflies this summer – but come to think of it, it’s not until August and early September that I usually do see them in this park. And the weather has to be sunny!

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Anyway, this Friday I saw two different ones: Besides the Small Tortoiseshell (above) also a Red Admiral, who preferred not to let himself be photographed.

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The Willowherb flowers are growing old…

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… and the Rowan berries are getting red, already.

Another day recently I saw another little creature that did not let me take its photograph, so you will have to take my word for it. It was when I was crossing a street  near where I live that I saw something very small scuttle out in front of my feet, then stop and freeze. Really, it was so small that at first I thought it was a large beetle. But when I bent down to have a look, it turned out to be a teeny-weeny mouse. Truly, it cannot have been been more than 40-50 mm + tail. There was a car coming and I did not want to see the wee thing get run over… I tried to to get it to climb onto a piece of paper I had in my handbag… It wouldn’t though, so the best I could do was just “shoo” it back into the high grass at the roadside (out of which it had come)… And once I got it moving in the right direction, it disappeared very quickly - leaving me wondering what on earth it was I’d seen. Browsing the internet, I can’t find that there are supposed to be any pygmy mice in Sweden! So I can only assume it must have been a very young wood mouse.

Below is a postcard I got a while back from John in England – but on the back it says Printed in Sweden! (so I assume the artist may be Swedish as well)

En smakbit - Tasting the Berries

11 comments:

  1. the post card is precious, i love it... and small mice are just so darn cute... Andrew in England has photos of a little wood mouse that are just the cutest ever.... maybe it was a just born baby.. that first photo is awesome. it looks like you took scissors and cut part of the sky and put it in the street. great find... some would just walk right by and never see it....

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  2. The postcard is adorable and fits right in with your story. That would have been an awesome picture, but you were busy protecting the wee thing. Your butterfly shot is gorgeous!!! And what are the beautiful blue flowers?

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  3. such a stunning reflection of your beautiful sky!

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  4. This is a grand reflection.
    It may have been a Shrew if it had a long nose.

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    1. I don't think it was a shrew, Adrian. It looked like a wood mouse, it just seemed much smaller than any I've seen before.

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  5. It sounds just like the tiny little mouse I nearly stepped on during one of our walks in Ripon this year, maybe you remember the picture from one of my posts. Did "your" mouse look like that?

    Our weather has been very unpredictable, too. One could never leave the house without an umbrella all week. Summer is definitely over, although we'll still have some nice sunny days.

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    1. What a lot of posts of yours I had to scroll back to to find your mouse, Meike. I'm afraid I've had to skip too many blogs lately. Hard to say but I think yours looks furrier than mine, the impression lingering in my memory is that the one I saw was a little darker and sleeker, but very mousy-looking with perfect tiny pink "hands" and big black eyes. Just smaller than any mouse I've ever seen before - but then I don't really come across them very often!

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  6. So long as they don't try and over-run my house or (as they once did when I was in NZ) my garden shed I love mice. The Rowan Trees here are very full of berries too this year. Perhaps we are in for a cold winter.

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    1. I don't want mice in my house/home either, Graham. I was not happy when the man who cleared the House for us this summer reported that he'd seen signs of mouse activity in a couple of storage rooms... However, we've not seen anything after the house was emptied, and to my relief the technical examiner recently did not see any up in the attic either. So we'll take no further action, just forward the observation.

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  7. What a lovely butterfly and it goes so well with the flowers it is on. I saw a tiny little mouse running along a tube platform the other day. Very grey and dirty looking, so I suppose it might have normally lived at the bottom of the rails.

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  8. We have field mice here that are so tiny they could be mistaken for large beetles. We have slugs that are bigger!

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