"Bring out your loony animals…daffy dogs, crazy cats, batty budgies…" The Goodies

FT99: Findng it impossible to enjoy her garden because of the large numbers of ants, my mother decided to destroy the six large nests that had appeared in her lawn. Conventional poisons had little effect, so in desperation we poured paraffin on each nest and set them alight. We thought the problem was solved. A couple of days later we went to check the nests and found hundreds of ants scurrying about carrying tiny white eggs they were apparently rescuing from the ruins. Fearing new nests we boiled kettles of water and poured them over the blackened heaps. No insects could survive that treatment – or so we thought.

The next day the doorstep, the window sills and even the roughcast of the walls were brown with what seemed to be tea leaves. A closer inspection revealed several lines of ants stretching from the back of the house to the ruined nests on the lawn. The ants were collecting the dead bodies of their fellows, carrying them about 30 feet down the concrete path, and leaving them outside our house to show us what we had done (or so it seemed). Then they went back for more, even bringing dead eggs. The work was clearly well organised. We were so unnerved by the ants’ revenge that we took no further action against them, despite the fact that within a few weeks, the nests were as busy as they had ever been. Valerie Button, Cullompton, Devon.

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FT100: My friend Diane was attacked by a horde of squirrels last October when she and her two children attempted to retrieve conkers from beneath a certain tree in Chingford cemetery in north-east London. She was bombarded with horse chestnuts still in their prickly coverings and then there was a quite obvious shaking of the branches to make more fall. The incident reduced her children to giggling hysteria as Diane reeled under the eye-watering pain of a hard conker landing squarely on the bridge of her nose. A huge bruise came up later making it look as if she had been in a punch-up – most people didn’t believe her story. We speculated whether it was a display of territorial aggression over food or ground. Have any readers experienced bolshy squirrels? Penny Boot, Woodford Green, Essex.

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 FT105: "Watch out Big Cat about" recounts a tale of a savage attack on a Range Rover by a presumed puma [FT101:23]. I wonder whether another alien mammal might be a culprit. Several years ago my wife and I visited Canada. While staying with friends in the countryside near Kingston, Ontario, we learned that their car had frequently been attacked by porcupines, who had apparently acquired a taste for car tyres, brake hoses and rubber in general, to the extent that they never parked outside their garage. At the time this surprised me, since I was under the impression that porcupines were, like hedgehogs, small, harmless and rarely seen. However, when we later saw several in a wildlife park in Quebec, we were impressed with their agility and power, and found it easy to believe that they could trash a car overnight.

Do porcupines (or, indeed, pumas) actually enjoy the taste of rubber, or is this some form of instinctive revenge for the mammalian automobile fatalities which decorate our country roads? I think that we should be told. David Musker, London.

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FT105: While driving towards London on the A12 near Witham in Essex in late July, I noticed that above the small trees that line the left-hand side of the road were tight columns of "midges" or other little fly-like insects. These were not the normal diffuse cloud of insects that I am used to seeing when out in the open, but a tight column of about 4-5in in diameter and 4-5ft in length. Traffic conditions prevented me from stopping for a closer look, but I saw that there were a dozen such columns directly above a tree. Is this unusual? It was a Sunday at about 9pm with the sun on the horizon. There was good visibility and the weather conditions were typical of a late evening of a hot sunny day. Don Trower, Braintree, Essex.

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FT107: The mother of a friend of mine recently related the following story: Her dog, Tubbs, is a Labrador trained to retrieve things (normally frisbees or tennis balls) without harming them. Recently in the depths of the Hampshire countryside he brought back an unusual package. It consisted of a mass of writhing grey fur and blood. On closer inspection it turned out to be a number of grey squirrels. These were immediately taken to the nearest vet. He discovered that the lump consisted of four grey squirrels whose tails had been caught in a bramble. One of the critters was dead and another had to be put down, but the other two were released back into the wild. Colin Wilkinson (by email) [Editor’s note: for a recent "Squirrel King" see FT104:11].

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FT109: A couple of years ago, my husband and I went camping in the Lakes District. It absolutely poured down for half a week and we spent several waterlogged days tentbound. In the field next to the campsite was a large number of sheep which spent their days alternately eating, sleeping and going "baa". One evening, however, this changed when there was a stupendous thunderstorm. All the sheep stopped what they were doing and looked in the direction of the first lightning flash.

It was a weird sight as some were standing on three legs, some were lying down and others were caught mid-munch through a mouthful of grass. It was as if they were all hypnotised. Is this a usual occurrence with sheep and lightning? Being townie bumpkins we don’t know. Can someone enlighten us? Sally Jordan-Kidd, Cambridge.

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FT110: The street where I live in Cardiff often has parked cars with the windscreen wipers raised. For the last year or two, our local crows have devoted their lives to ripping the rubbers out of all windscreen wipers left in the normal resting position. The wipers are raised because the birds cannot then sit comfortably while they are doing their sabotage.

They don’t remove the rubbers for nesting purposes; they just leave them (adding insult to injury) on the car bonnets. I lost three sets of wipers in 1997 and my sad story can be repeated by many of my neighbours. The RSPB can’t help, other than by selling us silhouettes of hawks or falcons to stick on our car windows. These are greeted by crow laughter and have no effect. Have you any advice? Brian Evans, Cardiff, Wales [Sounds like the cockatoos here in Canberra who in seconds will have flipped open the cover of a street light and be enthusiastically hanging upside down from the light fitting inside, tearing away at the rubber insulation with their beaks…]

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 FT112: Driving near Hereford last year I noticed a flock of sheep, all of which (with only a few exceptions) were walking slowly in single file in two parallel lines across the slope of a hill. There were no other people or animals around, the sheep didn’t appear to be walking from or to anywhere in particular, and they didn’t appear to be keeping to any clearly defined tracks or paths. Unfortunately, I couldn’t wait long enough to see whether they eventually did an about turn and started walking in the opposite direction. Can anyone offer any explanation? David Cotton, Leicester.

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FT115: The letter about sheep near Hereford seen walking in parallel lines [FT112:51] reminded me of a story told to me by my 80-year-old father-in-law. When he was a young man working on a farm near Tal-y-Bont in Brecon, he saw dozens and dozens of rats moving across a field in one black mass led by a white rat. He watched this strange spectacle with some trepidation; it reminds me of the story of the Pied Piper.  The Tal-y-Bont valley was flooded for a reservoir, but I don’t think this was connected to the rats’ behaviour. Has anyone seen or heard of anything similar? R B Williams, Talgarth, Powys.

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 FT119: The letter about those rats moving en masse across a field with one rat leading [FT115:52] reminds me of something my father told me. Until their house suffered fire damage during the Blitz, my father lived with his parents in Coventry. One night, my grandfather was walking up Broadgate when he saw a seething mass of rats moving down High Street with one lone rat leading. A policeman also saw it. Both assumed that the rat’s habitation had been destroyed and that they were looking for new quarters. As a result of the blackout, the rats just disappeared into the darkness. G M Stocker, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

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I stood watching at close quarters for some minutes through the chainlink fence that bordered the school football pitch, with the birds taking no notice of me at all. I was impressed by the number of magpies gathered; this was before the population explosion of these corvids. In my earliest years it was rare to see any magpies. Alan Gardiner, Burgess Hill, West Sussex.

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 FT131: My father served in Cyprus with 42 Survey Engineer Regiment – a small surveying and map-printing unit of the Royal Engineers. The unit was based just outside a fishing village called Zyyi, on the island’s south coast about halfway between the British Forces Sovereign Base areas of Episkopi (near Limmasol) and Dhekelia (near Famagusta).

The few brick and stone buildings were used mostly to house the printing presses, processing areas, etc. So, apart from the officers, the unit of about 150-200 men lived in large four-man canvas tents. These were extremely popular with the local cat population and, over time, perhaps 70 cats (it was impossible to know if they were strays or wandering pets) were adopted by various squaddies.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say the cats adopted the men. Whichever way round it was, the upshot was that the men left out bowls of water and scraps of food and their "pets" kept coming back. The practice was never officially sanctioned and the cats were forever getting underfoot, but the general attitude was one of tolerance, probably because the cats’ presence dissuaded other creatures such as rats and mice.

This was the arrangement when my father arrived in 1959 and it lasted throughout 1960, but the following year it was decided to convert some of the now empty buildings into living quarters and to vacate the tents. So over the following weeks the number of tents reduced as they were dismantled and their occupants transferred into new quarters.

As this was going on, the officers made it clear that cats would not be allowed in or around the new accommodation areas. Although nobody said much, the popular belief was that the cats would be rounded up and destroyed when the last tents were vacated.

Whether or not this would have happened will never be known since, on that last morning as the final few belongings were packed, there was not a single cat to be seen. This was highly unusual and caused much comment – where had they gone? Nobody believed the cats had already been rounded up because they would have heard something. In any case, whoever had done so would have talked about it – if not straightaway then surely in the months that followed. It’s possible that some of the cats’ "owners" chased them away, but everyone felt sure the cats would eventually return looking for food. After all, that’s what cats do.

Indeed, a very few cats were later seen outside the perimeter wire or near the cookhouse, but they very noticeably kept their distance. Strangely, although the animals knew perfectly well who their "owners" were, and the men had moved no more than 150-200 yards from their original location, not a single cat ever ventured into the new accommodation areas. To the men of my father’s unit, it seemed as if the cats somehow knew they’d be in danger if they did so. The incident was generally thought to be peculiar and was a topic of conversation for a while, but gradually it was forgotten. James Clark, Mitcham, Surrey.

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