MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 50

 

 

 

Well, the desk is now looking respectable, and though it isn’t as green and pretty as the bower, there are shelves and notice boards for useful and favourite things.  I mentioned recently that I had rediscovered my Furby; I have now found Furby’s friend, Shelby. Shelby is noisier than Furby, sings and tells ‘Knock Knock’ jokes, so I will have to make sure his shell is clamped down or else I will never get any work done! By my feet, curled up on his red tartan rug, is my cat Tigger. Unfortunately, due to the fact that our garden is too small with a main road at the end, I can’t have a real cat – and anyway, our garden is a bird haven, so I can’t risk disrupting that. Therefore Tigger is the next best thing, a sleeping toy cat, perpetually curled on his red tartan blanket.

We do, however, have a lionhead rabbit, called Moppet, who is seven and a half years old. Lionheads seem to be particularly laid-back rabbits, very gentle and placid. Ours tends to relax by lying in weird un-rabbit-like positions, such as almost on his back with his legs in the air – which was quite worrying at first! His soft fluffy coat needs a lot of brushing, and tends to attract wisps of hay which he trails through the house. He is quite vocal, too – he grunts happily as he runs along the hall, or when sitting under the kitchen table.

 

I’ve had so many pets over the years – cats, tortoises, hamsters, mice, guineapigs, gerbils, terrapins, budgies, canaries, zebra finches, fish, lizards, stick insects, axolotls, clawed frogs and giant snails. Many of them I have bred. I have only ever had one dog, way back in the 1950s and 60s. His name was Rex, and he was a cross between a spaniel and some kind of terrier, but his fur grew so long he resembled a small Old English Sheepdog. Rex was very friendly, a great companion for a child, and he adored running through the woods near our home plunging his nose down rabbit holes or seeking out sticks. Rex thought big. He never brought home a small stick – oh no, he dragged home fallen branches! He almost did himself an injury once when he misjudged the size of the enormous branch he had in his mouth. It was wider than the width of the door and he ran towards it only to be brought jarringly to a halt as the branch caught in the ornamental trellis of the porch. It was a wonder that his teeth didn’t fall out.

 

Fire Bellied Toad

Asian Painted Frogs

 

White's Tree Frog

 I’ve always been drawn to small exotic creatures, especially amphibians, and managed to breed several species in the 1980s and 90s, writing my experiences in various fish and reptile-keeping magazines. Creatures such as fire-bellied toads with their beautiful orange tummies, and the even more beautiful Oriental fire- bellied toads with bright scarlet undersides, as well as the no-less colourful yellow-bellied toads – all these provided hundreds of tadpoles, and, in time, tiny froglets. Then there were fire-bellied salamanders who were meant to give birth to live young (rather than lay eggs) by immersing themselves in shallow water, although in the case of my female, shunning the shallow water and giving birth in damp moss so I had to quickly save the young before they dried up. I bred various types of newts, too, but my favourite frogs, so-called ‘Asian painted frogs’, never bred for me though they called for hours. And I never attempted breeding with my enormous green, grinning White’s tree frogs. These enjoyed being out of their tank, liking best of all, for some reason, to sit on top of a clock in the dining room! My favourite amphibian ‘pet’ was a big black axolotl (like a large newt larvae, with feathery gills) which I called Fred. I bought Fred when I was about ten or eleven, and he lived for around fifteen years.

 

MacLeays Spectre Stick Insect

Then there were Indian stick insects, which sprayed their thousands of eggs all over the floor of the tank and which soon hatched into minute replicas of their mothers (the females were so liberated they didn’t need a male to breed) and delicate pink winged stick insects which tended to hang from our ceiling. I also kept Macleays Spectre stick insects, which were enormous, about 6 inches long, and very spiny, resembling something from a science fiction film. They laid attractive marbled brown eggs, like small beads, which hatched into scuttling little nymphs and it wasn’t till they had moulted several times that they suddenly made the dramatic transition into a spiny monster.  Giant land snails were interesting; they are hermaphrodites (they have both male and female parts). They had a weird love play which entailed them simultaneously firing a ‘love dart’ at each other, and they would stay entwined, mating, for several hours before gliding off to bury their clutches of pearly eggs in the damp soil.

Alpine Newt

 Perhaps by now you’ll have guessed that during my desk clear out, I came across plenty of photos of my ‘exotic pets’, and so I was inspired to write about them in my blog. As I do so, Moppet the rabbit sits on my feet grunting softly, to remind me that he’s there and that he would like his ears stroked. And that is one of the drawbacks of toads, frogs, snails and newts – fascinating though they are, you can’t really pet them!

 

Moppet enjoying the snow