Normanby Nature at last!

Well after 2 years of blogging I have finally managed to put together a post which actually fits in with the blog summary above ie Normanby, Garden and Nature!  So here we go - the first two images was how part of my garden looked last week and the following images show the devastation of the weekend - we have decided the pond isn’t big enough so we have taken out the raised bed and existing pond to make way for the new pond but this has meant we have had to dig up some of the patio which is where the fun begins…..



 Wayne emptying the old pond
…under one of the patio slabs we found this mouse nest - the female shot off and left 8 tiny babies shivering so we collected the nest and babies up and put them into our Bumble Bee box and placed it close by in a border - 5 minutes later the female is back and one by one takes all the babies out of the box and back under the remaining patio, she then continues removing all of the nest out of the box and takes that also under the patio - so all’s well with the mice back to the pond!




For four months now our pond has been invaded and wrecked by two local Mallard ducks from Normanby Park - they have eaten virtually all the plants and probably all the pondlife or so we thought - as Wayne was draining the pond he found this adult Smooth Newt together with 3 Frogs, 1 Toad, 1 Giant Diving Beetle, 7 baby Newts and dozens of Water Snails - everything taken out of the pond has been saved ready to go into the new pond including most of the water, sludge and plants


The last image above was taken of the rescued Newt which is now in a tank - I shall post further images of the new pond as we progress - could be a long job!