A sad day

I seem to be obsessed, blog-wise, with the wildlife in my back yard. I don't quite know why this is. I suppose school holidays and summer do tend to push you out into the back yard, and there's not all that much that is interesting to write about inside the house. There are rooms, and they are filled with our furniture.

I thought the back yard was coming good on the wildlife front. Fireflies good, mosquitoes bad. Glorious red trumpet vine good, odd-looking fungus bad. I think I'd started seeing it in terms of a scorecard. Fireflies good - fifteen love. Mosquitoes bad - fifteen all. Trumpet vine good - thirty fifteen. Fungus bad - thirty all. You get the idea. I had a feeling that I was winning, or at least getting the upper hand.

I asked someone round to help me learn about the plants, and she came yesterday, gave me loads of helpful information and left me some gardening books to borrow. She told me where to buy a large long-sleeved smock-like garment (a smock, in fact) impregnated with insect repellent, which I can keep by the back door and put on whenever I go outside. I got all excited about the potential of the place. I was planning a triumphant blog entry (perhaps with pictures) about our lovely back yard. I was going to tell you my clever anti-mosquito strategies, the beautiful birds, the squirrels (including Poor-tail, the one who is easily identifiable by his half-missing appendage), and the crowning glory, our little tame rabbit. How lovely to have a tame rabbit in the garden (see how at this point I lapse from the back yard into the garden again). How surprising, given that our predecessors had two cats. He looked like a wild rabbit, but we live right in the middle of the city - where had he come from? He was tame enough that he would not move away until you approached very near. It was easy to get within 4 feet of him. I had set the children the project of trying to get him to eat a leaf from their hands by the end of the summer. We had put out carrots and celery and a bowl of water. I loved that rabbit. He had become our rabbit.

You know where this is going. It was 6-yo who found him. "The rabbit has died. At least I think it's dead. It's got a purple eye." He was right. It was dead, and it did have a purple eye. No other signs of cause of death. Flies already closing in. The children are remarkably philosophical. They are sure that they WOULD have managed to get him eating out of their hands by the end of the summer (although on the evidence of the amount of time and patience they had for the task, I silently doubt it). They agree with me that he died probably as a result of eating something poisonous, that he didn't die a horrible death, just had a poorly tummy and went to sleep, and that it was nice that he had come right up to the house to die - he must have wanted to be near us. I used to opportunity to reiterate the rule about not putting anything from the garden in your mouth (3-yo is a worry on this front, at that age where it is funny to do naughty things, or be about to do them, she has been deliberately putting leaves in her mouth and coming to show me - I don't think she'll be doing that any more. Sorry, rabbit, but I couldn't help using you as a cautionary tale).

I was telling yesterday's gardening friend how I had been surprised by how hostile (a word I apologised for in advance of using) the environment here is, and how that seemed to make such a difference to daily life. I had never truly appreciated how very gentle a country Britain is, in terms of climate and countryside. She understood, and then put it very eloquently: "Here, we do have to try harder and take more steps in order to live happily alongside nature". I know in the grand scheme of things, the death of one rabbit doesn't amount to much. He did, however, make our home here feel a bit friendlier, a bit softer round the edges, a bit less hostile (there, I've said it).

Today it definitely feels like Advantage Back Yard.

Fireflies in the back yard

Oooh, another bonus. No-one told me we'd have fireflies in the back yard.

So far, I've found the wildlife rather hostile. There are spiders with bites that can turn nasty (and even fatal, but don't tell my mother that bit). These are called fiddlebacks after the outline of a violin that you can see on them, or brown recluse. The one we saw marching across our basement floor wasn't very reclusive, though. Probably ailing or dying, according to the pest control man who came round to spray the house (oh so tempting to say "Hello Spiderman" when I opened the door to him).

Then there are fluttery moths, large numbers of woodlice (I've never seen so many, but at least they have the decency to stay hidden under stones and bricks and any toy left outside overnight), mosquitoes (lots, apparently, as the summer wears on), ants (many, many), chiggers (which bite your ankles, mine more than most, but you can effectively stop the bites itching with clear nail polish, I'm told), and termites (we know we don't have those, at the moment, as you have your house inspected for them when you buy it).

So it was with great joy that I witnessed the fireflies. I have never seen a firefly before, but have always imagined they would be charming and curious. And indeed they are. They are truly lovely. They are little blobs of yellowy-green light that switch on, float around, and switch off. It is like having magic in your back yard.

Husaband and I agreed that all we needed was a couple of garden chairs and a bottle of wine, and we could have spent some happy time sitting in the warm evening breeze watching the fireflies. Sadly, Husband is off wine as on antibiotics, and we have no garden furniture, although it has been on our agenda (I'm talking two attempted and aborted shopping trips with bored children). But it's very good to know that the fireflies are there. I'm so pleased to have met them, and I'm going to enjoy getting to know them better.