While watching garden birds feeding from nut and seed dispensers I observed a coal tit selecting sunflower seeds and flying to various locations to insert them in the soil and then cover them with small pieces of earth. In eight years observing I have never seen such activity and was not aware that birds stored food.
Joe Smith, Lucan, Co Dublin
Coal tits are the only native tits that store food. The marsh tit and the willow tit, which are not normally found in Ireland also hoard food.
Me and my family found about 10 blobs of stuff like frogspawn without the black bits on a big, huge sliding rock in Glencree. Sicked up blackberries and a tiny skull were on top of the rock beside the blobs. What could they be? Daire MacAughligh, (aged seven) It was almost certainly frog-spawn without the black bits. Dr Don Cotton, the Sligo biologist, believes that frogs have already started to make the jelly before they go into hibernation; and if the frog was eaten by a predator, such as a fox, the jelly would make it sick. The sicked up blackberries would also indicate a fox, and the little skull could have been that of the frog.
Out prospecting for holly, I found not a single berry this year. Hazel nuts were also non-existent this autumn, and the Spanish chestnuts are producing only a few, small, wrinkled nuts, all of which are being harvested by our family of red squirrels. Is it the same for the rest of the country or only north-east Cork?
Peter Langley, Fermoy, Co Cork
My place of work is on South Lotts Road, Dublin 4, and on a recent morning I watched a fox cross the road and stroll into the front garden of a house which backs on to the Gasworks grounds on Barrow Street. Paul Carroll, Dalkey, Co Dublin
Edited by Michael Viney, who welcomes observations sent to him at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E- mail: viney@anu.ie