Animals

Four years since I last¹ mentioned hedgehogs² here. Time flies. As far as I can remember, I haven’t seen a hedgehog in the meantime. I was wondering – was that previous hedgehog lucky or unlucky? It’s hard to say. The same goes for this one.

I’d already heard strange noises in the yard first thing in the morning but not been able to find the source. It was only when I went to turn on the tap to refill the ducklings’ pond that I spotted the hedgehog stuck in the drain, treading water.

Mia fetched a pair of gloves for me and I hauled it out and put it on the floor, where it proceeded to stagger around in a circle, leaving a trail of stagnant water behind it. Then it stopped at sat there stinking and shivering.

It just so happened that in the porch we had a very large cage with a heat lamp suspended above it. With the three ducklings now out in the orchard, the only remaining occupant of the cage was The Friendliest Chicken In The World^TM who surely wouldn’t mind sharing. More about TFCITW another day, maybe. I put an open box in the cage under the heat lamp and left the hedgehog in it to recover. Once it had stopped shivering, it curled up and went to sleep.

An hour or so later, an almighty squawking came from the porch. It looked like the hedgehog, having recovered and eaten the peanuts I left for it, had climbed out of its box, whereupon TFCITW had tried to cuddle it and got the nastiest surprise of its life so far. It had the sense not to try it again though, and I set the hedgehog free in the garden after dark.

Can a baby starling swim? This is not a question I’d ever asked, until I saw one fall into the River Nidd yesterday. Luckily I had a camera in my hand at the time:

You might need a good connection to view that video. I tried to reduce the bitrate, but it came out too blocky and spoiled it when I went too far. The quality of the original video (96MiB of it at the original resolution of 1280×720) is amazing. It was recorded on a Panasonic DMC-ZS3, which I think is a superb almost-pocket-sized camera, the only downside being a shortage of manual controls. Unfortunately the cameraman wasn’t of the same quality, but you get the idea – after a few seconds of pondering its predicament, the baby starling can indeed swim.

Note to self: I converted the video using the following command:

ffmpeg -i /shares/pictures/2010/2010-05-29/P1010955.MOV -ar 22050 -s 400x226 -qscale 5 -f flv waterwings.flv

Next question – do they like swimming. I think the expression on its face says it all:

It let me get very close to take that picture. I suspect it sat on that rock for a long time, drying out and coming to its senses. Again, only the original uncompressed image at 3648×2746 really does the camera justice, but the version I’ve butchered for the web doesn’t look so bad either. Click it twice to get to the 1024×768 version. Any arguments that it’s not a starling will be happily accepted if you know better – I’m not 100% sure.

Saturday – a trip to Cheshire to visit our horse, Mouse, who is on an extended holiday there and apparently enjoying it very much. I was pleased to discover that she hadn’t forgotten me – something she demonstrated with a huge cuddle the like of which was in the past reserved only for special occasions such as the delivery of her dinner in the snow.

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Kiko (she has a name now) took her first trip to Suffolk to meet Meg, a real Border Collie. They spent the entire weekend wrestling in the garden, leading to another gratuitous set of doggy pictures…

We took a trip to Huddersfield yesterday and returned with a seven week old puppy. She’s half Border Collie – the mother is a rescue dog who started getting fat when they got her home and then produced four large puppies, so the identity of the father is unknown.