I realise that those of you with corporate lives have had enough of all this - Anne took 3 hours to drive to work yesterday - before turning round and coming home again.
But, being in the slow lane, I'm still making the most of what will probably be a once in a lifetime experience. Yesterday King Charles Wood was impossibly beautiful - the sort of scene that had it been on a Christmas card or calendar I'd have dismissed immediately as victorian whimsey and gone and got me gun.
Still, that's all repeats really - what I'm praising is the programme cobbled together last night by the Springwatch/Autumnwatch team. In one hour they managed to answer most of the questions I've been asking myself - now that's public service broadcasting.
1. Why there's been a lone fieldfare in my front garden for the last three days.
2. That those strange scrapings I'd been seeing were actually the wing tips of pheasants touching the snow as they took off.
3. The difference between rabbit and hare tracks.
4. That the swans I've been seeing flying in formation for the last week or so are actually geese!
5. That it was a dead stoat we saw frozen in a field on Sunday not a weasel.
No mention of woozles, sadly...
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so what's the difference between hares and rabbits - we saw loads of tracks and thought they were all rabbits.
ReplyDeletemy interest has been captured by the birds in the garden this winter. blue tits are investigating the box outside the back door already. today the #1 male saw off #2 male, whilst a little female watched from the balcony handrail, head cocked in judgement. lucky girl, to have them fighting over her.
It's actually worth looking on BBC's i-player thing to see Simon King's explanation of this - rather funny.
ReplyDeleteWell, for one thing hares are so much bigger than rabbits (and I walked straight into a hare on a lane yesterday and I can tell you they can be bloody big)...
Rabbits hop so that front feet hit ground at same time and back feet likewise, so you're looking for two pairs of parallel paw-prints with not much of a stride in between. Hares have a longer stride, but crucially their back feet land dog-wise, so non-parallel, with their front-feet landing as per a rabbit.
Boy, that's not easy to explain - I think their site has a set of pictures of various tracks - that'll show what I mean better than I'm describing!