Roamin' in the Gloamin'

[snailrind]

Bunty's mother has gone away to a UFO conference, and has left her haggis hound with him, to the disgust of his cats. A haggis hound is used up here for the hunting of wild haggises (obviously). South of the border, she's known as a "smooth collie" or a "Scottish sheepdog", but that shows what they know. Personally, I am against the barbaric

Comments

[uk_sef]

Bunty ... spent several minutes collecting conkers.
Bunty evidently has excellent taste ...
Then he got the ball stuck in a tree.
... but a rather poor aim. The squidgy ball lost in a hedge here last weekend has not been seen since, despite searching. It's quite a voracious hedge though. It eats all sorts of things.

[snailrind]

How did the ball get eaten by the hedge?

[uk_sef]

It was thrown in (accidentally I presume) during a game of "spider" (a multi-person version of piggy-in-the-middle). It vanished without trace within the dense foliage. Several people have poked at the hedge, looked under the hedge (including crawling/walking under it), looked down from above the hedge and of course searched quite a lot of the other side. The ball can't even be seen, let alone retrieved. Hence "eaten" is an appropriate approximation for its state. You could get fancy and say "enveloped" instead, I suppose

[uk_sef]

We have trouble with haggis round here. There was until recently a large steelworks somnewhere in the neighbouring county of Northamptonshire and they employed so many Scots the accent was slightly changed. Of course many of them brought their own pet haggises down with them which, when the steelworks was peremptorily closed, were either eaten because of the sudden poverty or escaped. We have a lot of trouble with the escapees and the damage they cause.

[uk_sef]

(Jab)

[snailrind]

I admit they can be a pest, especially in suburban gardens - built, as they are, for broader wildernesses. But eating them is really going too far.

I've discovered some similarly interesting wildlife on our excursions into the no-man's land on the outskirts of Stirling: neeps and tatties. They're not as cute as they sound.

[forgothefantasy]

Not particularly tasty, either.

[snailrind]

You're not a neep girl, then?

[forgothefantasy]

Not particularly. I like the fish part of fish 'n chips. There are too many chips for one's own good, and too soggy to be worth a damn.

[uk_sef]

The ball was indeed regurgitated at some point (perhaps in the high winds near the end of the year) and was found just before the new year by a visitor. It has been back in the pond doing its job of keeping a hole in the ice since then.

Unfortunately, the snow deluge as well as ice was just too much and I now find (after the thaw) that another of my beloved frogs is dead. Worse still, it was a gravid female - one of my very few and much needed females. :-(

I had been concerned that the one already being grabbed in an amplexus death grip, just before the deep freeze event hit, wouldn't be able to make it up inside the frog-pod to breathe. So that's my current guess at the death scenario.