Strange Wildlife at The Malthouse!

If you've been to stay at our bed and breakfast you'll know that we we have a pretty big garden.  Whenever we have time to spare we're often outside watering pots, cutting grass, tending to plants and occasionally (well fairly often if we're honest!) having a cup of tea!  For quite sometime now we have been feeding the birds that visit our garden.  We really enjoy watching the birds (it gives us an excuse to have longer tea breaks!) so this year we decided to add a few extras for them.  To try and encourage different types of birds to come to the garden we've been putting out a wider variety of food.  We've also made two window feeders that are fully stocked with food.

Here is one of the window feeders.   

If you don't have one of these bird feeders you really should consider getting one.  It took approximately three weeks for any birds to be daring enough to use the window feeder BUT once one bird tried it LOTS more followed!  Our window feeders are attached to our dining room windows.  It's lovely to enjoy a meal and see the birds swooping in and out enjoying their meal too!

Birds are not the only wild animals that come into our garden.  Recently we've spotted hedgehogs, badgers, foxes and squirrels.  We're particularly fond of the birds and very pleased to see all the other animals but since we've started to put out more bird food we've noticed more squirels too!  The squirrels are cute chaps and we know that they need to eat but we do wish they wouldn't keep pinching the birds food.  The squirrels are particularly fond of the fat balls that we put out for the birds.  The fat balls that we buy are individually wrapped in green mesh.  If the birds eat the fat balls the green mesh is left behind for us to throw away.  However, the squirrels often get to the fat balls before the birds and take everything including the green net!  We have a silly sense of humour here at The Malthouse, we imagine that the squirrels use the green nets as hair nets and laugh at the thought of Alton's squirrel population having perfect hairdos!

Now a couple of weeks ago we had a lady named Kylie (not Minogue but equally as beautiful!) staying with us.  This lovely lady has stayed with us before, it was great to see her again.  During Kylie's stay we stood outside chatting about the weather, garden, wildlife etc and we we're telling her about the local squirrels having hair nets.  We thought Kylie would think we were mad and that we might not see her again, so imagine how much we laughed when we saw how she had dressed one of our squirrel garden ornaments. 

What a relief it is to know that other people have the same daft sence of humour as us!  Hope you see this blog Kylie. x