The owls are active at night and can be heard calling in the woods; when the clouds are scudding across the moonlit skies in a chilling and active wind it can be quite ghostly. The builder was removing sand from a heap and disturbed a toad that had dug down to what it thought was a safe place for the winter. When removing some bricks from the ground a number of young moles were found under the pile. They were pink in colour, very small and must have been a late brood. They scurried away in all directions.

This is the time of the year (depending on the weather, of course) when I start to feed the birds. The first thing to be done is to wash and disinfect the bird table and seed containers because every morning a helping of porridge, bits of bread, left over-potato, pastry, fat and anything else the birds may like, goes onto the table. One seed container holds a seed mixture and the other contains peanuts. The seeds need filling every morning, as they are most popular, with blue tits, great tits and chaffinches taking their share. Once the routine is started you have to keep going with the seed, otherwise the birds hang around waiting for the feeder to be filled up and thereby wasting time instead of hunting for food themselves (if there is any to be found). It is always a delight watching the antics of these small garden birds around the feeders.

The robin is the most recognised and best loved bird; it is a friendly and most welcome friend to the gardener, always around, just out of arm's reach when you are in the garden working, and ready to pounce on the unsuspecting bug that may get uncovered by our activities. The males however are very aggressive in defence of their patch, so much so that a fight develops, allowing the blue tits to sneak up and have a pick of the offerings while the robins are having a dust up over who owns what. As the robins spend more time looking out for other robins to "see off", I have seen them chasing male chaffinches when they mistake them for another robin (The pink breast of the chaffinches?).

Animals and Insects. Have been looking for places to hibernate if they haven't done so already. Some species of butterfly overwinter in out houses and sheds and ladybirds hibernate together in sheltered crevasses; insect boxes are a good way of helping insects if you have one.

Snails seal up their shells with mucus and sleep the time away, having found a nice sheltered spot. You can get ahead of the game in gardening terms by searching them out before they breed in the spring and start eating everything. Look under pots, bricks, stones, inside holes in walls, under plastic, etc. This year, unlike previous years, was not too bad for slug and snail damage due to a cold winter (remember the snow?), and a hot June. Snails and slugs prefer warm, wet winters and wet springs to provide ideal living and breeding conditions. We do not know what weather 2010 will bring. But it does help to prepare for the worst, and helping the bugs' predators will help keep pests down, and by snail hunting now!