Fauna

William asks: "Do you have a hiking pole? I find it helps a lot. And tell us when you see some interesting animals."

Someone at the monastery is making hand chipped walking sticks. They'll be selling them soon, I hear. I'll take a pic when I buy one.

I saw a fox. It ran right across the country lane when I was walking home the other day.

And lots and lots of birds. On one of my Marcite walks, I sat down and worked out how many bird species I'd seen and it was over twenty. There is a travelling party of European goldfinches that visits the cherry tree currently blooming outside my front windows.

And a big very bright green lizard shot across my path while I was walking across a field. Much bigger than the little grass lizards you see all the time.

Ummm... sheep... cows... goats... horses...donkeys...

The garden centre guys keep a really great fishpond, and they have the cutest little terrapin, no bitter than a pocketwatch, in a basin on their cash counter.

I saw caddisfly houses and mayflies skittering across the surface of one of the millponds, and trout in the water, and this amazing spider that runs around on the surface tension of the ponds like its a big trampoline. That was pretty cool.

I have wondered why I'm not seeing any bunnies, but I figure they're mostly out at night. Also, most animals can hear/smell you coming a mile off and skedaddle.

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Also, I was going to respond to William's question about local animals in the commbox, but it's doing something incredibly annoying and I'm effectively locked out of my own commbox.

One day this "reCaptcha" thing appeared, presumably a generous gift from the Google-gods, and started demanding that I click a thing to prove I'm "not a robot". Then it evolved into, "click this thing, and now answer some annoying bulls___ skill-testing questions..." and suddenly it was getting annoying to use.

Today, it's set up some damn thing like a puzzle where you have to match photos of street signs or some such... which has officially made it Too Annoying to be Allowed to Live.

I turned off comment moderation because it's a thing for cowards who don't have the spine to throw people out themselves. But now it's back and undermining my absolute and supreme authority as the god of this 'blog. I am quite capable of slapping down the misbehaving masses myself, thank-you Google.

Any of you computer-types know how to shut this damn thing off? I have done a little html tweaking, so I went into the template to try to find it, but no go.

Any ideas? aChristopher? Anyone?



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