Critters, great and small

Scary ones first …. Yes, there are scorpions and snakes here …. No, we haven’t seen any, yet.  Apparently, the scorpions are small and live in the stone walls that create the terraces.  We keep them and the snakes in mind when moving rocks and the like around the property, and if we leave our boots outside we give them a shake before putting them on or bringing them inside.  I was going to say we’re cautious of snakes in the grass and bushes when we’re out on the trails, but we’re not really.  I mean, what are we going to do?  Carry a stick and beat the grass both sides of the track before we take each step?  No … we charge on regardless.  So far, so good.

A couple of caterpillars, next to a power socket.

Pesky things next.  Mosquitoes.  Enough said, probably.  We get bites, they eventually go away and meanwhile we get new bites.  Oh well.  Caterpillars.  Now, here’s an interesting one.  We have them inside the house, on the walls, floors and ceilings.  Not the cute, furry type – these are more like worms, but with little legs to keep them stuck to the surfaces.  We have to watch where we walk – not that we always do.  At times I’ve gone around our bedroom and bathroom – the rooms that seem to be of most interest to them (unfortunately) – and picked a dozen off the walls and chucked them outside, but there are always more to replace them.  Most unfortunately, it appears they do not like rainy days, of which today is our first since arriving here.  Sitting in the kitchen/dining room, where there are usually none, I can glance at one wall, from the bench level up, and see twenty of the little pests.  It’s similar upstairs in the bedroom.  The only thing that makes me not freak out over the whole creepy-crawly situation is that the garden is full of beautiful butterflies, and they have to come from somewhere!  So, rightly or wrongly, I keep thinking about all the beautiful butterflies growing in our bedroom.  The rain’s stopped – I hope they all go back where they came from – wherever that is!

Out in the garden there are, as I said, lots of beautiful butterflies.  Fifty-five different types have been recorded here.  And there are electric blue and yellow dragonflies that hover over the pool; spiders galore, but no more and nothing scarier than we see in New Zealand; bumble bees, honey bees, wasps of various kinds, hornets, and a particularly large and beautiful blue-black bee; lots of ants too, from tiny ones to those a centimetre long; and house flies and large flies with iridescent green eyes and tiny flies. And small skinks and maybe geckos – it was too quick for me to be sure.  In the sky we have eagles that call like the phoenix in the Harry Potter movie, big black crows, swallows, and another bird, similar to a magpie.

At night we go to sleep with the sound of chirruping frogs!  It sounds like we’re surrounded!  I was attacked by one in the garden one day.  Well, maybe ‘attacked’ is a little strong.  I was pulling a weed out of a clay pot with a flowering geranium in it when a frog jumped out and crash-landed into my leg and bounced off into another plant.  I was probably more surprised than the frog, but I suspect it was more upset.

I should mention dogs.  We don’t have one here, but Sue’s neighbour does and he (Lucky) visits every morning and leaves a deposit on the driveway somewhere.  As we’ve walked around the hills we’ve found that many of our neighbours have dogs, either locked behind gates or on chains – they’re very effective door bells!

On our first self-powered visit to Taggia we left the village early in the afternoon to ‘wander’ home.  We knew it was not a great time of day to be trudging up a hill because of the heat (30-something degrees), but the traditional siesta had surprised us – almost everything closes down from just after 12pm to about 4pm.  Luckily the gelato shop remained open, so we sneaked in one of those (one scoop each of chocolate and liquorice for me – yum!! – and coffee and biscotti for Nigel), but the supermarket doors were closed (a main reason for our trip).  Just as well.  The trip home was ‘unpleasant’, and that was without the weight of groceries.  We missed the turn-off to the track – it gets little use so is a bit overgrown – and with our heads hanging down and tucked under the umbrellas, which were giving us some relief from the sun, we missed the signpost.  The track had been recommended to us as quicker than taking the road, but that was the last time we used it – it took us over an hour to get home from the village, but our next trip, along the vehicle track and in similar heat, was only 40 minutes.  It was about 3pm when we were on the track above ‘home’ – I glanced up to see the pool, on the other side of the small valley, looking back at us so invitingly, and saw a hind (probably a fallow deer) wandering along the terrace below the pool.  Later that afternoon, Nigel saw three deer on the other side of the same valley, and we saw one again yesterday.  We don’t know if they’re protected or not, but they seem pretty comfortable about wandering around in the open in daylight, so my guess is they’re not hunted.

The pigs were back here last night.  We knew there were wild pigs here because Sue pointed out their excavations around the trees, and she told us about her broken solar panels.  Then a week ago ‘something’ rotary-hoed one of the raised vege gardens – I had wondered if it might have been the deer, but I’d thought they were more ‘nibblers’ than diggers.  But the digging had seemed quite neat, not very deep – not comparable to the holes dug around the trees.  And the garden is raised by 70cm or so – I didn’t think pigs would climb that.  The pigs have proved I don’t know all there is to know about pigs!  The pigs were definitely here last night.  Before I go further I should explain that the house’s back wall is three-quarters buried in the land behind it, which means our upstairs bedroom is half buried, and the small back window is not far above ground level.  That’s where the pigs started their garden jaunt last night.  There was lots of sneezing and snuffling as they poked their snouts through the straw (left behind by a previous Helpx-er’s strimming), chomping sounds and squeals.  Perhaps we should have given them a fright and sent them off – we’ll certainly give that a try next time we hear them – but when the noise subsided we slept.  Meanwhile, they must have made their way to the end of the terrace and onto the other terraces to decimate the vege gardens.  Ratbags!

I’m ‘with’ Gareth Morgan on cats in New Zealand, particularly on Stewart Island.  Having said that, I do enjoy stroking and cuddling cats – a purring cat just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.  We had a Siamese cat when I was a kid, and as a young adult I had my own Burmese kitten.  But I know they are all little tigers.  Killers.  They don’t care if their prey is an imported pest or a baby kiwi, or some other endangered native.  They kill and torture for fun if they’re not hungry.

Helga

 

Demetrius

 

Anyway, back to Italy, where there are plenty of cats.  Sue encourages the feral cats because they keep the rat population under control.  The cats are fed a little about every second day to keep them around, and they are named, and a couple of them are not too different from a domesticated cat.  Helga, the only female in the troop, became very attractive to the boys a week ago, and it’s been all go for that week.  The poor wee thing has been mounted several times a day, night and day – and a very vocal activity it is too!  Once we noticed one of the boys try to mount her while she was mounted by another.  The newcomer seemed to appreciate the difficulty of his position so moved off and sat watching and waited his turn.

Florien

 

Sue had warned us to watch the cats if we had meat out.  We learnt the hard way what she meant.  I had a pack of rabbit legs defrosting on the bench and left the kitchen for a few minutes to go upstairs.  On my return I opened the door and Florien (the top Tom) escaped past me with one of the legs in his mouth!  I let him keep it – there was no way we were going to eat it – and the other leg was still safely inside the other half of the plastic wrap.  Florien had pushed in through the insecure insect netting on the window to steal his prize!  Another morning I came down to find Demetrius sitting atop the pantry units – he’s worked out how to open the retracting insect netting in the lounge window – human hands have to push on the two little levers to push the netting frame down into the window frame then push away to get it to ‘un-click’ before it retracts.  How Demetrius achieves the same result we do not know, but he’s done it twice.  We now always [try to] remember to close the glass windows before leaving the kitchen/living area.

Well, we can’t think of any other critters we have met, so that’s all for now, folks.  The sun is shining again.  It’s still paradise. :-)