You miss the patter of tiny feet among the leaves and the debris of the garden edges. Well, in fact the feet are so tiny that you don't hear the patter at all unless you have very acute ears. The creatures are gone - haven't seen one for years and yet they were, if not plentiful, at least always there to be found - the pygmy shrews, our smallest mammal, often about 3g., and with a very short life. Now and then a cat brought one in.
This particular tom cat always had to be confined to a room for a couple of hours after feeding. If you let him out when full of food, he would wreak awful damage among birds, and anything else he came across: shrews, mice, frogs.
The pygmy shrew had a lovely pointed nose and whiskers to match. A new book, Exploring Irish Mammals, by Tom Hayden and Rory Barrington, published by Town House and Country House, which will, of course, be seriously reviewed in this newspaper, just happened to be leafed through and reminded of our lost denizens of the spaces under the trees, permanently floored with dead leaves. But the loss of the shrews is peculiar to this arca of the Dodder, for, a couple of miles up towards Stepaside, a woman tells of her cats regularly deposing dead shrews and mice beside her bed as tribute.
Along with the loss of shrews, this particular patch of south Dublin seems also now to be without hedgehogs. In the past it was not unusual to see one of them accompanied by several of its litter. With the exception of a blonde, half-grown specimen (albino?) a year or two ago, no sightings for a long time.
Badgers are said to eat them. And badgers, for at least a decade, have been seen and fed on a regular basis. Which brings us to the one newcomer to the scene. For the first time ever a squirrel was seen running up the oak tree. A grey. Is this the trailblazer? In Robin Pages country diary in The Sunday Telegraph there is a small piece about grey squirrels as meat. A butcher sold them to the writer. We have heard of them being eaten in America and also in Scotland, but the verdict here of Page who casseroled the squirrel was: `the onions and carrots were very nice'.
A man who barbecued squirrels from the same butchers gave his verdict: "bloody horrible". Anyway, they don't do that much damage, not even around the bird feeders.