About Me

My name is Jules and I am a wife, mum and nanna. I have recently taken early retirement from Special Education which was a job that i really loved. I am loving life and fully intend to make the most of it making some fantastic memories along the way. Family and friends are very important to me and I enjoy spending time with them. I love socialising and having a laugh.

Tuesday 24 July 2018



Creature Comforts

Hi Everyone.
Thought I'd let you into the wonderful world of wildlife that inhabits our cottage at any given time! What prompted this post was a knock at the door at teatime tonight by a couple of teenagers asking if we had a box. It's the joys of living in a semi rural area that you see lots of wildlife. The teenagers had found an injured bird (a pigeon) and, as teenagers do, wanted to save it. Hubby tried to gently say that maybe the bird wouldn't make it (he's lost count of the number of birds our own children have "rescued" over the years only to be found dead in their shoe box the next morning) but they were determined to try to save it. In the end, they agreed to put it into a box and leave it under a bush close to where it was found. I worried that it was one of 2 birds nesting in our oak tree at the moment (fortunately it wasn't). Maybe it had been hit by a car?
Our cottage is over 200 years old and we have had plenty of encounters/issues with all sort of creatures over the past ten years that we have lived here. Firstly, there was the ant infestation that we had and now seem to get every May time, there were the field mice under the floorboards (twice), the frogs that somehow managed to appear under our dining table one day,  the sparrows nesting in the roof space, the blue tits nesting in the rear garden, the pigeons nesting in the oak tree, the slugs that sneak into the lounge and kitchen during the night, the bats in either ours or the neighbours' roof space, the bees in the guttering and their extended family of bees that have set up home in a hole in our lawn and then, just for good measure, we have had a family of rats that have been using our garden as a run to get from one house to another!
When I lived in my previous property, I only ever had the occasional woodlouse or moth so didn't know what had hit me when I moved here. It seems it is the joys of living in the countryside! Add to the mix our own mad Cocker Spaniel and we are well blessed. But you know what, I wouldn't change a thing. I love our little cottage with all its guests (well maybe not all) and feel blessed to be here. 

Have a lovely evening,
Jules x




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4 comments:

  1. This looks like a real zoo, haha. With non-zoo-ish animals.
    Frogs under the dining table, never heard of this before ;-)

    https://ruraltownliving.blogspot.com

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  2. Hi Ivy, We came in from work one evening and the dog was going mad and acting strange by the dining room table. We thought his ball was under it or something else that he wanted then we spotted about half a dozen baby frogs hopping about. To this day we have no idea how they got there. The only thing we can possibly think of is that the french doors had been left open by our teenage daughter earlier in the day and maybe they had hopped in then? We don't have a pond but our neighbour does. It's a real mystery x

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  3. We get the odd mouse.....the house has been professionally baited since the last one. Outside we get rabbits, moles, mice, squirrels, raccoons, possum, skunks.....and we live in the city,

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  4. Oh my goodness, its a good job they're not all indoors. We have had to have professionals in for the mice and we got together with the neighbours and paid between us all to bait rat traps at each cottage. They have gone now....hopefully! x

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