Doing the rounds

A couple of days ago, I met Toad making his way up the garden path. Rescued from a dustbin a few years back, he has since lived in the garden and only appears in the spring when he seems to want to migrate somewhere. To avoid him getting flattened of the road, a fate common to many of his kind, I took him to a neighbouring pond to see if that would satisfy his wanderlust.

Today, I came across one of his erstwhile companions, Mole, busy snuffling about in the grass beside a local walk presumably looking to set up home

.

Unfortunately, the third member of the trio is now not so common. Ratty, the water vole, is on the endangered list. I have caught the occasional glimpse by the burn but the only time I ever got close was to a corpse, neatly dissected by, perhaps, a heron. It looked like a big hamster.

Odd how things get the wrong name, Ratty wasn’t a rat; hedge sparrows aren’t sparrows and the dames violets, that are coming into flower, aren’t violets. They may not even be violet coloured, at least the ones by the beach path weren’t. They were white but they smell like violets…or, at least their scent is what people think violets smell like …like those little purple sweets that you used to get…cachous, I think they were called.

I went for a stroll to a little water meadow surrounded by whins with their own, wonderful coconut scent to see if I could find any traces of the trio’s big chum, Badger, but the sett seem to be deserted, however, another older one, close to the village seems to be getting a remake… or a fox has taken it over. Certainly, there seems to be active digging going on.

The whirligig beetles on the pond in the meadow were spinning round in shiny arabesques. Why? I wondered, but then much of what we do seems, and probably is, as pointless and time-consuming as the beetles’ endless circling. Their activities must confer some advantage, though, making it more difficult for predators, perhaps, for Nature and evolution do not allow pointless expenditure of energy. Only humans are permitted that self indulgence as anyone who has followed Scotland at rugby for the past few seasons will know.