Once upon a time hedghogs were regular visitors to our garden and gave us great pleasure.
They could be heard approaching the house in the dark, as their claws 'clicked' on the concrete path. We would leave out a dish of cat food and another of milk - they were noisy, untidy eaters! Tiny hedgehogs ran up and down the flower borders in broad daylight and were a constant delight.
Sadly these sightings are a thing of the past.
However, at 7.00a.m. on Sunday 5 August 2001 I was excited to see an adult hedgehog standing on our lawn, apparently feeding from the border. At. 8.00 a.m., as it was still in the same place, I went to investigate and gave it a gentle nudge, whereupon it fell over to reveal that it had lost its left front leg. This had been torn off cleanly from the shoulder. The hedgehog also had abrasions on its underside, which led us to wonder if its leg had been caught in a fence, but we could find nothing to confirm this.
It was a bizarre sight and a distressing experience to find this mammal in such a normal-looking posture - dead, but standing on three legs.
Can anyone shed any light on this strange occurrence?
Jean Garrod
After one heavy downpour this October we discovered a damp patch on our bedroom ceiling. As the bedroom is part of a flat roof loft extension I decided to investigate.
Climbing onto the roof I discovered a puddle surrounded by a neat mound of roofing stone chippings. In the middle of the puddle was the decomposing body of a mole. It had clearly spent a number of fruitless hours trying to burrow through the roof. The only explanation we can think of is that a bird (probably an owl) had dropped its prey on the roof and had failed to recover it. No doubt the insurance claim will make amusing reading - 'mole caused leak in roof'!
Janet Buis
This is a good year for autumn colour, shown not so much by dying leaves but in the seasonal embroidery of the hedgerows - the scarlet hips and haws, blue-black sloes and shocking pink berries of the spindle. There has been a plethora of fruits - a bonus for Suffolk hedgerow surveyors, for these provide valuable additional clues to help identify the species.
Colin Hawes
Following my article on the corticoid fungus Peniophora incarnata (White Admiral 49) I wish to clarify the following details. At the time of writing the article in February 2001, I had taken the sample of fungus to the inaugural meeting of the Norfolk Fungus Study Group. Here Richard Shotbolt identified it as P. incarnata. In his opinion it was an uncommon find. I was then moved to write the article in the hope that it would encourage naturalists to look for the less obvious and uncommon forms of fungi that no doubt exist in Suffolk.
I am by no means an expert mycologist and am on a very slow learning curve. If I have misinformed anybody, I apologize. I would also like to apologize to those who telephoned or wrote to ask why I had written such a "silly piece", when this fungus is very common in Suffolk.
I must admit that I by-passed the Suffolk Biological Records Centre during my research and went directly to the British Mycological Society (BMS) Website.
I did not mean to imply that those recording fungi in Suffolk do not submit records. It was just my own observation of the Suffolk records seen on the BMS database.
Colin Jacobs
Jane Morris of Somersham telephoned me on Tuesday 11 September with a strange toad story.
She has a small copse with a pond to one side. On the edge of the copse is a hawthorn tree and five to six feet up this tree is a natural depression forming a shallow cup.
Jane is in the habit of putting a few peanuts in this shallow depression for birds which regularly come to feed on them. On the 2 September at 10.00am she reached up to replenish the peanut supply and saw what she thought was a clod of earth on the branch - a 'clod' which turned out to be a toad!
The toad must have climbed the tree, which, Jane said, was not straightforward nor an easy feat.
She did not see the toad again on her regular visits to the feeding station and thought it must have been an isolated occurrence.
However, on the morning that she telephoned me, she found the toad again in exactly the same position.
What attracted the creature to this spot?
Do toads often climb trees?
Jean Garrod
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