Hello and welcome to this wild life special as part of my blog about living off-grid on November 27th 2020. I enjoy being ‘in the nature’ as the French call it, but I am no expert on flora and fauna, nor am I of the disposition to spend long hours patiently watching and waiting for something to happen. Luckily for me, there is such an abundance of wildlife around us that it feels as if they come looking for me, rather than the other way round. Let me share with you some of the weird and wonderful creatures that have crossed my path in the last few weeks.
Mother and her youngster – roe deer in our field
We need to be up early to catch the deer in the morning and also very quiet, once they realise we’re there, they disappear in a second.
This splendid black and yellow fellow is a salamander and we literally almost stepped on him in the dark as we went out one rainy night for our final visit to the loo shack. The photo seems very bright because of the flash – apologies.
A praying mantis – it happened to move just as I saw it otherwise I would never have known it was there.
And another one – found this one under the solar panel
The above might look just like a muddy puddle, but in fact it is a wild boar wallow. We found it on one of our woodland walks and the trees around it have got rubbing marks where the wild boar would have finished off their bath with a good scratch.
And lastly we come to the video for this week. I expect many of you will have seen murmurations of starlings but this is a murmuration of wood pigeons, something I had not realised these birds do. It happens every year here during November/December as they congregate before heading off to Africa. I took this video a week or so ago, and since then the numbers have swelled into almost plague proportions. I imagine the farmers certainly think so as these birds are landing in the newly ploughed fields along the length of the valley in front of us. At night they roost in the trees, but sadly they have been too far away for me to get another video as good as this one. I have now become quite used to seeing, and hearing them, but at the time I took this video it was a wonderful new experience for me – as you can probably tell! I hope this video is going to come up properly. I am having a few technical glitches, the type of glitches that will result in electrical goods being thrown out of the window very shortly! If you cannot open video please let me know.
That’s it for this week folks. Hope all is well and see you next week.
M-J
The Olivia Rose Diaries 
Magical! The video worked perfectly on Safari, but not from Email. However, I found that if you pressed ‘Comments! on the Email, the video appeared! It is hard to believe that they were pigeons!
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Hi Antony. Yes, I thought they must be starlings until I looked more closely.
MJ
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How wonderful to see all those wood pigeons. I love when flocks fly low enough to hear the wind in their feathers, simply amazing. That little salamander is so beautiful… I am glad you saw him before you stepped! Amazingly, I thought ‘boar’ when I saw the photo, even though I don’t live anywhere near wild boar! It pays to read, I guess. 😉
Lots of fun wildlife in your area, I enjoyed seeing them.
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Glad you enjoyed it.
MJ
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