I’d put a bit of leftover roast pork out for the creatures, and just after 5am the fox found it. It was just starting to munch on it when a white streak shot across the screen – it was one of the cats but too fast to see which one. The fox fled for its life. Two minutes later the camera activated again with Schrodi sitting on the stone where the meat was – so I guess the victor was him. So the fox is terrified of the cats, presumably because although he is larger, they are in their home territory. He couldn’t have been that scared though because half an hour later when the cats had gone he was back to finish his dinner.

We had another wonderful creature night as always seems to happen when we get a mild one in winter; pine marten, two badgers and the fox. Plus there were deer crashing around in the trees when I was out making a bonfire this afternoon.

The picture is of the fox just before Schrodi swooped in.

R took some photos which unfortunately didn’t turn out that well due to the lighting and the reflections in the glass.

We think it is possible that two martens are visiting at the moment as this one seemed significantly larger than the one on the webcam the other night.  You are supposed to be able to tell them apart by the outline of their cream patches – but that would require quality photos of both occasions which unfortunately we don’t have.

The heron is catching so many of the poor frogs that today for the first time I tried shoeing him off – just to give them a chance of enjoying their conubials in peace for a while. But to no avail; three times I chased him, and each time he was back within half an hour. The ducks are also spending nearly all their time on the pond at the moment – they are very sweet the way they sleep on the water with their heads tucked under their wings.

Then this evening there was one mature red deer hind and a yearling – presumably her offspring from last year grazing on the back lawn. Hopefully they will keep clear of the daffodils which are now coming into full bloom. As soon as R saw them he ran to get the anti-tick liquid for the cats – it is about that time of year again.

The picture is a bit of a cheat as I didn’t manage to get a photo of the heron today. As you can probably tell from the lush vegetation, that one was taken in the correct location, but in June last year.

This week, however, we have an almost nightly visit from a pine marten, who yesterday morning about 7am sat eating the nuts put on the ground for the badgers for about 20 minutes (presumably he had finished the ones put on the bird table for martens!).

We have also had a few visits from a fox who is also helping himself to the nuts (apparently from research on the Internet they like peanuts – who knew). I feel quite sorry for him because he is very thin and the farmers around here shoot foxes.

What caught my eye was that one of them was apprehended having entered a house through the cat flap, eaten the cat’s food and then settled down for a nap in his basket.

I was telling my two boys about this and they were not impressed – so much so that I saw Tora guarding his flap from the top of the fridge in the utility room last night.

For example, I have seen badgers here on hundreds of occasions, but never in the daytime. Whilst I have actually been outside to physically see them from time to time – without the webcam I would never have realized how often they are actually around. With the Marten I have seen it from the window a couple of times, but would never have know it was there in the first place if it hadn’t been on the camera logs.

So this leads me on to a real life example. One of our friends was telling me that a food bin in his shed was regularly being ‘raided’ by some creature. He suspected the identity of the criminal but didn’t know for sure… So we lent him a motion detection camera, and sure enough a few days later it captured evidence that the thief was in fact a pine marten.

So I’d encourage anyone who is interested in wildlife to set up a webcam in a likely spot in their garden and see if they capture anything. Of course we are particularly fortunate here in Lochgoilhead, but even in urban areas you never know what you could see….

The dilemma was that for part of the time we could see two red squirrels trying to come to the table to feed. Whilst seeing them both in the same shot made for a good photo, we had no desire for the marten to catch one right in front of us (hypocritical I know). So we were constantly on edge and ready to scare the marten and/or squirrels off if necessary. Luckily it wasn’t necessary and the marten left in his own sweet time.

In the picture the squirrel is highlighted in red – unfortunately due to the size and resolution of the image very difficult to show both it and the marten at the same time.

Well this is obviously symptomatic of badgers’ general attitude to life as shown in this video, where the pine marten is disturbed whilst eating and runs off, with the completely disinterested badger completely ignoring it and heading for the food.

In this case, the marten was obviously not very scared, as the badger did not stay long, and almost the moment it departed, the marten was back for a renewed snack on the peanuts.

So I decided to give it a bit of TLC and my free time for the last few weeks has been spent on it. I repaired the door and the roof (probably not very skillfully), decorated it inside, and put some nice furniture and paintings in it. I also ordered a custom sign for the front – I went for ‘Pine Marten’s Den’ – though in retrospect it should really have been something heron related as it looks out over where the heron generally perches on his island.

One of the pictures shows Tora examining this new part of his territory and getting ready to put muddy paw marks on the new clean white floor.

We were also visited by our resident pine marten, unusually, twice in one night, and more unusually, he stayed for about twenty minutes feeding off the bird feeder. I don’t know if this is significant, but the marten that visited around 1am jumped on to the bird table, looked for nuts there and then left without checking the feeder. Around 5:30 – another marten turned up and then spent ages getting the nuts from the feeder itself. I wonder if it is possible that we have two martens in the area? Possibly a male and a female – though I would have thought the breeding season would be over by now….

Anyway – very nice to see although I think that due to extensive heron activity we are not going to see much frog spawn in the pond this year.