Wildlife in the Garden

I came across two mysteries in my London garden. This was the first...

How did my garden get to be full of egg shells?



OK. I have to admit that I partially know the answer to this one. Foxes. My garden backs on to a park which has a children's zoo containing a lot of animals - rabbits, goats, sheep, pigs, deer, ponies and so on - and also poultry of various sorts : chickens, ducks, guinea fowl and peacocks. It's also a wildlife reserve - and full of foxes. The foxes steal the eggs and bring them into my garden to eat. I frequently dig up old bones, or find the remains of dead pigeons lying around, too. The mystery is not so much who brings the eggs in, but how do the get them in the first place? Since a memorable chicken massacre which occurred many years ago, the enclosures have been made fox-proof. The fact that there are still chickens and so on around shows that they can't get in. So how do they get to the eggs? But year after year, wherever there's an overgrown patch of garden, I'll find white chicken egg shells.

We hear the foxes in the garden almost every night, and I used to spend a lot of time watching for them. But this year, it wasn't necessary to stay up - we frequently saw them in broad daylight. I think they were used to the garden being unused and abandoned. A big dog fox which I found doing something unmentionable in my newly-dug side bed was very startled when he saw me - and obviously couldn't quite decide whether to run for it immediately or finish what he was doing first. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me ...

The other mystery was - whatever were these odd-shaped tuber things? I must have dug up over a hundred of them, and couldn't work out what they were. Then after a couple of weeks I found this ...

and realised they were there for the same reason I had an oak tree growing in my rose bed ....

Squirrels. Burying their peanuts and acorns in my garden and then forgetting all about them. That does however leave another mystery? Why isn't my garden as full of peanut plants as it is of young oak trees?