Ground hugging cloud and night frosts not-with-standing, spring is coming. I hesitate to describe its progress in detail lest my account be used to fuel the global warming debate, on either side. Suffice to mention that we have primroses, celandines, grape-hyacinth all joining in with the daffodils. Black-birds are nesting, doves are flirting and I watched, this morning, a starling have a particularly good wash in one of our lilly ponds, hoping I felt, to get lucky soon.
It was during the process of fetching tools to contrive a prosthetic foot for one of our over-bath drying racks, that I had a close encounter with a remarkably bold brown mouse who was engaged in stealing the content of my bird food bag to line a nest built somewhere under the summer junk in the conservatory. With all of the windows closed, mice can only gain entrance (as far as I know) when the back door is left ajar by garden visitors, or more likely my youngest extracting his bicycle from the garage.
I set my home-made trap, with little expectation that it might operate correctly and I was unsurprised to find that, on Monday evening, the peanut-butter bait was gone, the door to the trap was closed but not locked and the mouse, was absent. As I've mentioned on another occasion, I had lost the humane mouse-trap that was purchased for another mouse in another home many years before; strangely and unbidden I conjured a vision of where this trap was stored and it took only a couple of minutes to find it, set it and bait it.
No mouse was foolish before I went to bed around midnight, but at 7am there was a rather subdued rodent fretting in the bought box. He was glad to find the shrubbery when I opened the lid, poor thing, evicted to fend with the rest of is kind.
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