Update

Books are still selling- look out for review in BBC Wildlife Mag next month!
Have been really busy working on my MA dissertation but I am am still here but have not been Blogging.

Good news is my new puppy Rosie arrives this Saturday so there will be plenty of Rosie posts so anyone who wants to Blog about animals- please feel fee.

Here is Rosie when she was 4 weeks old... plenty more will follow when she gets here!
She might even have her own Blog!

Redwings Essex and more

It's been a while since I Blogged what with a whole host of computer issues but I wanted to tell you more about Redwings...

Thanks for Gill's Blogging and from the pictures the Essex site looks very similar. What a great charity they are.

I got the chance to meet Gail who was lovely and we were treated to a free lunch before we started.

We were in a stable that was set out for other kids activities and my Dad- the cover artist, was the real crowd puller as immediately the children started queuing for pictures. Dad had offered to do line drawings of animals or Disney characters for £2- to be split between Born Free and Redwings.

Mum was on hand to take care of the money!

Gail and I were invited into the stable yard to give short readings. Because of the young children I knew my story was not appropriate so I read the ending of Bookey's and talked about honey badgers! And Gail read some of Pauline's to keep with the horsy theme! I told everyone about the book reminding them it is not a children's book which everyone seems to think it is- and then onto the signing.

I suppose we sold close to 10 books (or Redwings did as they have them now in stock- website and they will be in the Christmas catalogue!)

Dad was still drawing and still drawing- oh and still drawing when everyone else had more of less left! I think we made about £30, so £15 in the tin for Born Free- but it's all about raising awareness.

I got to meet Nicola Markwell who I have been liaising with since this started- back and forth and she is as lovely as she seemed on email!

Then we were showed around and got to find out all about the amazing work they do- as outlined in Gill's Blog.

It was a great day and I hope it encourages more of you to go to similar events.

Next Wednesday Lyn Fountain is scheduled to be at the Gt Yarmouth Redwings- only thing is Abi is unable to join her now - any volunteers?

Gentle Footprints is still selling although it has slowed down but we hope to keep it going. Look out for a review in BBC Wildlife Mag special AUTUMN edition out in September (possibly before)- it's an extra 13th edition so not the usual monthly one.

Let's keep Blogging about animals- anyone want me to tell you about the new puppy I am getting in 3 weeks time- including photos???


The place: (and the sun was shining!)





Us! Gail, my Mum and Dad- Dad being artist Colin Wyatt (happily no pic of me!)





The animals!










Debz :)

Redwings Oxhill
We had a great day there today. Redwings does some fantastic work with rescuing horses. We had a chance to go and visit the animals before we settled down to selling books. We were right opposite the quarantine stable and the young man housed there was very demanding of our attention. He will be out of quarantine soon – just one more round of blood tests and “pooh” examination and then he’ll go into a paddock with some other horses.
“High time!” you can almost hear him thinking. He “chatted” to us almost all the time we were there.
The animals at Redwings are a little different from the ones in Gentle Footprints and from the ones that Born Free normally supports. They have been farm or domestic animals and they have been ill-treated or abandoned or have become too ill for their previous owners to look after them. Sometimes the owners themselves have become too old, too infirm or too poor to care for them. Redwings is very keen to provide every animal in its care with the five freedoms:
1. Freedom from hunger and thirst
2. Freedom from discomfort
3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease
4. Freedom to express normal behaviour
5. Freedom from fear and distress
Born Free also stresses the importance of these five freedoms.
As you walk around the pens, paddocks and stables at Redwings, you can see how the staff there have attempted to provide those freedoms. It’s important for our equine friends also to have companionship and shelter. These help to provide the freedom from fear and distress and the freedom from discomfort. It soon became clear that most of the clients were housed with suitable friends.
We had a steady trickle of visitors to our stable and we were able to tell them about the aims of Gentle Footprints, the aims of Born Free and how our book was also supporting Redwings. We signed a heap of books and gave out several postcards as well.
The day had been billed as a fun activity day for children. There was a lot going on apart from our book signing. The youngsters loved the postcards. Their parents and some of the more regular visitors took an interest in the book. Not everyone we spoke to took a copy of the book, - they often had several children in tow and were already spending quite a bit on lunches and the other activities. I really believe, however, we have sown the seeds of an interest in the book… and if it appears again in the run up to Christmas, as I’m sure it will …. Redwings and Born Free are going to benefit again.

The Day of the Tiger

William Blake was so right when he described a tiger’s “fearful symmetry” and the cat as “burning bright” with its distinctive black stripes on orange fur. Tigers are generally found in forests but are highly adaptable and can be found in open grasslands and tropical mangrove swamps. Unlike most cats, tigers like swimming and can swim for up to 4 miles.

There are currently 6 subspecies of tigers, although there were 9.

The most varied and most common subspecies is the Bengal. Bengals are primarily found in India and Bangladesh.

If you see a white tiger, it is most probably a Bengal. White tigers only occur when both parents carry the rare gene and only happens in around 1 in 10,000 births. Not only do white tigers have distinctive white fur, they also have blue eyes and pink noses.











Another rare variation is the golden tabby or strawberry tiger thought to be created by a recessive gene. Golden tabby tigers have light golden coloured fur, pale legs and faint orange stripes and the fur is thicker than normal. Golden tabby tigers, like white tigers, are at least part Bengal tiger.










The Indochinese tiger is mostly found in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and China. They’re slightly darker and smaller than Bengal tigers and only a several hundred are left in the wild. The biggest threat to Indochinese tigers is a combination of loss of habit and the use tiger parts in traditional medicines.

In 2004 the Malayan tiger was recognised as a subspecies. There are around 700 left in the wild.

The Sumatran tiger is only found on the island of Sumatra and is critically endangered. These are the smallest tigers, adapting to the thick dense forests they live in, although their natural habitat is under severe threat from logging even in protected national parks.













The largest tiger is the Amur or Siberian tiger. It has a thick coat with a pale golden hue and fewer stripes.













The most critically endangered tiger is the South China tiger. From 1983 to 2007 no wild South China tigers were spotted and a photograph of one taken in 2007 turned out to be a fake. There are currently 59 captive South China tigers but these are descended from only six animals so have poor genetic diversity. There are plans to try and reintroduce these tigers to the wild.

Now extinct are the Bali tiger, the last of which was thought to have been killed in 1937, The Javan tiger, which became extinct in the 1980s, and the Caspian tiger which was found in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and surrounding areas and is very similar to the Amur tiger.

Tigers can mate all year round but generally breed between November and April. After a gestation of 16 weeks a female tiger will have a litter of up to 4 cubs. They will stay with their mother until around two years of age. They need those two years to learn vital hunting skills and if the mother is poached or killed before her cubs have reached maturity, the orphaned cubs will not be able to survive in the wild. Female cubs often take a territory near or overlapping with their mothers. Male cubs wander further taking a larger territory. However female tigers are not fiercely territorial and will allow grown cubs to share territories and even kills with a current litter of cubs.

The tiger has a long history in Asian culture, representing royalty, fearlessness and wrath. Most tigers have a marking on their forehead which resembles the Chinese character for “king” and consequently many cartoon versions of tigers feature this character on their forehead.

The tiger is one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals and represents matter, equal and rival to the dragon which represents spirit. In Buddhim the tiger is one of the Three Senseless Creatures, symbolising anger. The Hindu goddess Durga, as aspect of Devi-Parvati, rides a tigress into battle.

The tiger is the national animal of Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Malaysia, North Korea and South Korea. In a poll by Animal Planet, the tiger was voted the world’s favourite animal, winning 21% of the vote from 50,000 viewers from 73 countries.

THE DAY OF THE SEAHORSE

The seahorse was the first creature to really capture my imagination when I was a child. I remember seeing about them in a picture book and not quite believing they could be real - the thought of something that shape making its way silently, upright, through the sea seemed impossibly romantic. Then, when I became a feminist, learning that the male bore the young lifted these fish even further in my estimation.

Unfortunately, now that I am in this unique moment with other Gentle Footprints authors I find that the seahorse too is if not endangered then certainly vulnerable.

Why? Boat anchors and bottom dredging by fishermen damaging their habitats - they're quite fragile and don't adapt well to changing conditions; they're used in Chinese medicine (20 million a year taken); they're kept as pets (a million a year taken, of whom 99 percent are dead within six weeks). They're also captured, dried and sold as decoration (a million a year - I know, what is the matter with us?).

They're fish but they don't swim well. They get around by beating their dorsal fins 30-70 times a second and steering with pectoral fins on either side of their head. It's tough, so they prefer hooking their tail around the grasses they live in and just bobbing around. The eyes, on either side of the horse-shaped head, can move independently. How can you not love a creature that bobs around looking forwards and backwards at the same time? It's handy when looking for food - they eat things like small crustaceans, tiny fish and plankton and estimates are that adults eat up to fifty pieces of food a day. They don't have teeth but slurp the food up through their snouts. They don't have stomachs either thus the need to eat all day. Babies, apparently - called fry - eat sixty times that amount.

Which leads to the birth business. It was once widely said that they mated for life and were faithful, but this may not be true (they only live for about four years anyway). The female deposits the eggs in the male's pouch and he fertilises them there, then carries them for 14 to 28 days. They court for several days before breeding, and while the young are incubating the female comes to visit every day, where there's a greeting ritual. Depending on species there may be between fifty and fifteen hundred fry and contractions can last for twelve hours.

Of course, like all fish, once the young - fully formed miniature seahorses - are expelled there's no more nurturing and dad's ready to receive the next batch of eggs the morning after the night he's given birth. As we saw with NeiraKeto the octopus (see "Closing Circles" by Anne Cleasby in Gentle Footprints) thousands of them don't survive. With seahorse fry fewer than 0.5% of the brood survive, what with predators and delicate little bodies being washed away into colder waters. It seems very wasteful of life (why not have fewer and look after them?) but these creatures have been around one way or another for 40 million years.

We have two British indigenous species, the spiny and the short-snouted, found mainly all down the west coast and the south coast and there are another 28 species worldwide, including the fancifully named winged seahorse, hedgehog seahorse, giraffe seahorse and sea pony.

Oh, and they don't live in groups but can you guess what a whole bunch of them together are called? A herd of seahorses...

The Day of the Cuckoo by Lyn Fountain

Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu!

I was walking the dogs early Monday morning, and had taken one of my favourite paths, which is through the churchyard, up the incline of the wheatfield and along the line of the hedgerow behind the old Hall. It was cool and damp, the air was still and had yet to be stirred and warmed by a sun that was pale and weak for June. As I arrived at and turned the corner, facing north, a distinctive birdsong rose out of the haze of a distant clump of trees beyond the next village. It was the umistakeable call of a cuckoo. The first I'd heard since moving to the Norfolk countryside, and only the second time I'd ever heard one - the first time being around 15 years ago. A dozen times it called, "Cuck-oo.. cuck-oo.." in rapid succession, with barely a beat between the repetitions. It might be a bit late in heralding spring, and it's certainly not nearly summery enough here in chilly Norfolk, but - as corny as it sounds - the beautiful simplicity of it lifted my heart, and I couldn't wait to tell the first person I met that I'd just heard a cuckoo.

The cuckoo arrives in Western Europe from April onwards. After breeding, the adults return to East Africa around July, with the offspring following in September. From photographs, in the looks department - particularly because of size and head - I think they resemble the collared dove, but a cuckoo in flight, with its barred undercarriage, can also be misidentified as a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. Thrilled as I am to have heard the bird again after so long, I'd really love to see one next time.

Legend has much to say on the subject of the cuckoo. It is supposed to sing from St Tiburtius' Day (14th April) to St John's Day (24th June).
A very old book I have includes omens connected to birds, and of the cuckoo it recommends noting from which side of you the call comes. If it comes from the right, you may expect prosperity; from the left, prepare for disappointment. In my case it was straight ahead. Apparently the quarter from which you hear it will indicate the direction of your travels during the ensuing year. As 'my' cuckoo was calling from the north, I'm hoping not to travel too far in that direction. Any more than 30 miles and I'll be in the North Sea!

I remember bits of a little rhyme my mother used to chant to me about the cuckoo. And it went something like: In July time to fly, In Au-gust away I must. I can still hear her voice putting the stress on the '-gust' to make it rhyme with 'must'.

In his poem To the Cuckoo, William Wordsworth said: 'O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice'. So perhaps he found them difficult to catch sight of too!

The Day of The Dolphin

Dolphins are some of the most fascinating, intelligent, and beautiful animals on the planet. I have always been drawn to them since I watched the 'Flipper' TV show as a child.

I later realised that the poor dolphins used on the show were in captivity. I guess that when you're a kid you just watch the show to see the dolphins do stunts and tricks - I never considered that the poor animals were suffering. I know better now.

However I am happy to report that one of the trainers Ric O'Barry became a marine activist when one of the dolphins became depressed and committed suicide by refusing to breathe. He has campaigned for the last 38 years against dolphin captivity and against the horrific 'dolphin drives' which take place in Japan every year.

My first real encounter came about ten years ago whilst on holiday in California. My family and I were wading out into the rolling surf and then from the corner of my eye, about six feet to my left, I spied two dolphins bursting from the waves! They were close enough for me to see the water shimmering on their skin and their 'smiling' faces. I couldn't believe how close they were, or how beautiful. Since that time I have been lucky enough to see them at least five or six times fishing for breakfast along the Californian coast, but at a distance.

Then around five years ago I saw a programme on TV about the Moray Firth bottlenose dolphins. My husband and I went up soon after for a few days to try to see them, and once again we were lucky. I remember the weather was awful, cold, grey and tipping down stair rods!

I was spying through binoculars from the car at Chanory point, and because of the steamed up windows I had to do a double take. Was that a fin I just saw? Yes indeed! Without a moment's hesitation I jumped out of the car and raced through the driving rain along the shingle beach to where they were heading.

At the end of the point was a man with a huge camera set on a tripod soaked to the skin, and another man walking his dog. We chatted excitedly as we watched about ten of the magnificent creatures hunting for salmon just a few feet from the shore. After about fifteen minutes they swam further away , but it was such a wonderful experience. I'll never forget it.

They seem to have the ability to fill me with joy and wonder, and I know they have a similar effect on others. This is why I find it particularly distressing to find these creatures trapped in ridiculously small pens made to perform tricks, and also that they are still hunted by some.

There are about 45 types of dolphin in the world, the largest being the Orca or killer whale. They live from between 20-45 years in the wild but only 4-10 in captivity. They live in pods and are very social animals. The Moray Firth boasts around 130 resident bottlenose dolphins and many porpoises. Sadly hundreds of dolphin and porpoise die ' by-catch' worldwide every year. This simply means that they are caught in trawling nets and drown.

The WDCS (Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society) have two free sites in the Moray Firth you can visit. They seek to raise awareness about providing a safe environment for these animals. They also campaign against whale and dolphin captivity, and against the hunting of whales and dolphins.

I adopted a dolphin when I was up there, and for as little as £4 per month so could you! My dolphin is called Rainbow, and I receive a picture and reports on her progress each year. I also receive a very interesting and informative magazine every three months. See the link below if you would like to find out more.

http://www2.wdcs.org/hych/adopt/dolphin/pack.pph

I hope you enjoyed the day of the dolphin, and I hope it's made you want to find out more about these magnificent creatures.

Mandy :)