Things Seen

[bunn]

1) a small black cat disappearing up the lane.  I thought she had killed a baby rabbit at first, as she was clearly carrying something heavy from the way she was running.  Then she jumped up onto the bank, and I realised that what she was carrying was actually a very small black kitten.   I have not seen her before.  I wonder if she is feral?

2) dead (but not squished) on the road below Kit Hill, something that was quite definitely either a young polecat-ferret, or possibly an actual polecat.  I know that the Polecats are coming back, after having been almost extinct and reduced to a tiny relict population in West Wales -  but in theory, they are not supposed to have reached Cornwall yet.   So possibly a feral ferret?  Although the difference between a feral polecat-ferret and an actual polecat seems to be largely philosophical.

3) a huge moon.   I took rather a good photograph of it, but you will have to take this on trust, as I then accidentally deleted the photograph before I had copied it off the camera drive.  Oh well.  It's the moon, you all know what that looks like.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... further to this rambling, earlier this year there were two young black wild rabbits - definitely part of an established colony, not dumped pets - living a couple of fields over. And a couple of days ago I saw a rabbit on the hill that was largely white with only a few brown spots - I suppose that might have been a dumped pet. But then all of the British wild rabbits are *someones* dumped agricultural surplus...

I have seen an argument somewhere that the polecat is not really native at all, since the Welsh name for them is not very old, but in fact the British polecats are all feral ferrets.

The people who want to re-introduce the lynx to the UK wish to do so on the grounds that the deer in Britain have no natural predators. This seems an odd argument among a teeming population of human beings, for the most part not vegan in diet. Not that I would complain about lynx. But only on the grounds that lynx are awesome, not on the grounds that reintroducing them would somehow be more 'natural' than shooting deer or killing them with dogs.

Stag hunting must be pretty awful for the stag, but I can't help feeling it may still be less awful than being killed by a giant cat.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

The polecat name point is interesting.