Silly Season
Known to be very wet, west Wales not playing to character. Like the rest of Wales and England, no rain to speak of for months and high, high temperatures. The land is bone dry, the landscape is brown, many trees are showing signs of stress (the beech trees are totally autumnal) and the ditches are dry.
Water is the key to life, so I am so thankful that we dug ponds. They have largely maintained water (two of the scrapes and one pond are totally dry, but the other 8 or 9 ponds are lower than normal, but nowhere near empty).
And the beaver enclosure still has water, thanks to their industrious activity. The bigger dams, which are leaky, have almost emptied. This will have helped our farming neighbours, Rhydian and his son Daniel on one side, and Adrian on the other side of the low corner, as while the dams helps slow water flow when it was so wet earlier in the year, now they allow a steady trickle onto their now parched fields. These beaver created wetlands are what we need for the weather we have been experiencing ... these areas are natural fire stoppers. The Daily Mail headline "Rewilding link to record fires" on 13 August seems to ignore the fact that if you restore nature we can see a way to both less flooding in wet periods and less fire in the hots ones. May not be a very popular slogan, but rewilding can help to make Britain wet again ...
Back to our beaver enclosure; the pools closer to the beaver lodge remain in fine fettle. As you can imagine, we have been keeping a close eye on the progress of the newly born kit I reported on in the last blog. And it turns out that we had been fooled … not one kit but two! Jess dug out some great footage of the two kits messing around together:
And also of one of the youngsters playing at being grown up, having a go at dragging an admittedly very small branch, copying her (or his) Mum.
I’m guessing Doris felt that double trouble was too much to have out and about when they were first born. Could there be another? Unlikely first time around, but ...
Midsummer madness is not confined to the weather. Elsewhere in the beaver enclosure, we have a whole new family of pole cats. Looking at the video footage, I can only assume that the collective noun for poles cats is a tangle. They look like trouble to me …
The trouble continued beyond the beaver enclosure. As previously reported, we have a been having a crack at beekeeping. The winter was not great for bees in Ceredigion (and in fact much of the UK) due to, wait for it, a very wet January and February. However, we did not lose everything and were hopeful that the summer would not be a disaster. But with no rain and very hard ground, making scratching around for worms trickier than normal, some animals are searching a little harder than normal for a bit extra. And the badgers discovered the beehive …
Lesson learnt … we need to fence in any beehives. Hey ho.
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