The Bluestocking: To the moon and back gerbil style.

[Boiledbeetle]

Previous thread of chat and general madness below

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5506124-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-spring-is-sprunging-and-mns-name-generator-can-do-one

Women: from an orderly queue at the bar or take a seat and grab a passing gerbil.

Men: turn left at the end of the road, keep walking until you find the Staunch Ally.

Bar gerbil a full fat coke please and a packet of Scampi Fries please.

We have a bit of a thing for you too, Alex😄

Thank you. I will find lots of ways to use that. It really is fabulous.

💙to the knitters, combining creativity with skill, ingenuity and problem-solving to produce lovely things

We mentioned birdsong - I can't give you a recording, but you can see from the sonogram how heartily the wren is singing!

Just sewed in the last end. There were loads of the bastards. I'm faintly surprised it still bends and isn't puffed up like a cushion.

I was surprised when somebody who knows about that kind of thing said 'That's a wren' and it didn't match up in my mind to the titchy little ball of feathers that forages on the ground in my garden, very obligingly up near the kitchen window where I can easily see it - birdwatching for the lazy😃

Their voice is not in proportion to their size. Tiny bird, huge voice.

Goldcrests, on the other hand, are tiny birds with tiny songs.

Get yourself the Merlin app and you'll know your goldfinches f on your dunnocks in no time 😉

Yay! well done Cake! Will we get to see everything when it's finished? I bet it's going to be superb.

Robins always surprise me with how loud they are. I really must get round to downloading the Merlin app!

I keep seeing refs to the Merlin app, I should follow your advice
My Nature Notes are a bit pathetic compared to some people's [no names, no pack drill - but you know who you and your two dear dogs are, and should that be 'no names, no seed drill'😁] but here's one:

Yesterday I found a packet of out-of-date oatcakes and threw a few out into the garden [great fun as I threw them frisbee style and tried to vary the aerodynamic qualities of each oatcake..].

Within a minute or two it was as if I had turned a snow-globe filled with birds upside down!
Four gulls, five magpies and two or three ..um... crows? black corvids of some kind - descended on the garden in a vortex of noise and flapping and competition and carried everything away in a few moments. One of the magpies carried its oatcake away only as far as the roof of the shed and had its snack there, watching the spectacle.

After they had all gone, a single magpie landed and proceeded to walk around the garden in a very determined way, carefully picking up missed bits of oatcake. No flying, just walking. Like flying is for show, or only if they think there are ornithologists watching😄

Very early one morning, before the humans were up and about, I saw two magpies walking down the road. Just walking down the road, like they had somewhere to get to, or were out on their morning constitutional.

I bet if they had noticed I was watching one of them would have said 'Humans watching! Fly!''

I love the badger square, @lcakethereforeIam - I don’t have the nerve to try plotting my own designs, but I do have this book - Doodle Knits - one of these days I’ll use this to do a patchwork of different design squares.

I am so pleased there have been so many feminist knitters/crocheters/cheerleaders joining in the latest WH.

While I don't know what Rara's views were, she was a young woman who deserved the encouragement and support of feminism to plough her own furrow and not be constrained by stereotypes or others' expectations. I am sure she had many good role models in life (wafflenose is certainly a strong woman who doesn't bow to convention), it is comforting to think that she has also had support of so many FWR regulars and Blue Stockingers in death as well.

I know all WH projects are tinged with sadness but this one has been particularly close to home for me and I'm so grateful to everyone who has answered the call.

I'm desperately trying to get my last squares done ready for posting as I want to be sure I've used up all the relevant wool. Can't wait to see the whole blanket.

I'm sure it must be more energy efficient to walk rather than fly, if flying isn't absolutely necessary. And corvids are solidly built birds (honest, I'm just big-boned 😂) so getting off the ground is probably not as easy.

Did you see this, Marie?

https://www.woollyhugs.org/2025/09/17/2025-the-blanket-for-swashbuckled/

These are some older ones:

https://www.woollyhugs.org/mumnetters-blanket-projects/?cst

Those are amazing, thank you for posting the links Android.

I have been following the Wafflenose thread and knew of the blanket for Swashbuckled, but had not realised there were so many others.

What a wonderful initiative is Woolly Hugs and what wonderful people the Mumsnetters are!

Merlin is brilliant. Sometimes it mistakes things, but in general is vv accurate - so far as I can tell, anyway. Now and then it tells me it's heard a redwing or something, and I replay and think, Nah, that was me and the garden tools.

It doesn't ID our semi-feral local peacocks, or the nest of baby birds already shouting their heads off in next door's garden, but it picks up goldfinches and chaffinches and kestrels and so on.

And bloody autocarrot, yes, I meant kestrels plural, and nest not best, and redwing and not redoing.

Thanks for the website name, Cake.

The Aventures of Brains and Batshit, episode 649

When I took B&B out yesterday, we saw two hares. Hares do one of two things: get up when you're 30+ yards away, or flush from almost underfoot. One we disturbed at a distance, and it ran a hedge line, jinked and vanished. The second was inches in front of the dogs, and did that thing that only hares do, and flushed towards the threat, when it had a free choice of the whole field. The dogs bounced through a quick 180, and stopped on the whistle - by which time the hare was racing off down the meadow. It curved towards the hedge and a few feet out, it did that other thing that only hares seem to do. Sensing that there was no pursuit, it came to a standstill and turned to look back at us, sized us up, and then stretched out its beautiful self and loped - one, two - through the hedge and was gone.

Brains bounded over to me. 'Gosh! And wasn't I good? Good enough for some sort of a reward, surely?'
Batshit meanwhile was sniffing where the hare had been. She finally looked me. 'A hare! Super exciting! So much FUN!'

The rest of the walk was quite chill, apart from a partridge alarm-calling from the depths of the wheat-field as we walked up the hill. Brains was clearly on to something, possibly partridge-related, and had to be called out of the crop about three times. Batshit was more interested in the rabbit warren, but the bunnies were all well underground.

Another wonderful word picture, thank you Edith. We are so lucky to be able to read them, I think they should be published with lovely illustrations showing B&B and all the birds and beasts and growing things you encounter and describe so well
Thank you Android, I'll save that link to Woolly Hugs to see the current project when it's finished - I saw the beautiful one for dear Swash, but it might have been here rather than on the WH site.

WH is such a wonderful thing, translating 'I wish I could do something' into these beautiful comforting manifestations of support.💙

We'll all get to see them when K&P has worked her alchemy. I've just put mine in the post. Hopefully they'll arrive safely.

I always enjoy reading the Tales of Brains and Batshit and the accounts of rural life @EdithStourton I live on the coast, which has a semi-rural hinterland but could not be described as deep countryside. Too many towns and people nearby. That said, I did see a hare last week when I was driving through the lanes and stopped to let a tractor into a field. The area used to be well known for hares in days of yore, but hunting by the local landowners depleted their numbers considerably and these days you are lucky if you spot one.

I

Thank you for the compliments, Marie and Damson - and Marie, I loved your account of the birds and the oatcakes. Magpies always look so self-important, as do jackdaws. Rooks just look scruffy and disreputable. Crows look as if they are bent on world domination.

Where we are isn't deep countryside, not compared to plenty of places, but it is very agricultural. And we have lots of hares. The landowners around here like them, firstly because they just like hares, but also having a lot of hares is thought, on the face of it counterintuitively, to put off coursers, who are one of the banes of rural life. Apparently coursing is all about money, and the money comes from betting, and the bets are laid on dogs coursing a single hare. But hares are notorious for not only getting up right under the feet of the dog, but also from taking a course from another hare - so the tiring hare, that is being pursued by a tiring dog, is replaced by a fresh hare, and dog hasn't got a chance.

And the farmers all know if they have a lot of hares, because they go out on spring evenings with thermal scopes 'and there can be six, eight hares in just one field'.

I glanced - only glanced at the titles, [edited to add: in the Shopping section] I don't want to have another navy velvet blazer experience😕 - and I saw this one

No show socks (again)
Surely if you've been stood up by them before, and they let you down again, it's time to LTBs? How many second chances to you give to the unreliable so-and-sos? 😄

I agree. Time to ditch them in favour of socks which respect you enough to show up when you expect them to.

I love the Merlin app and use it regularly when walking. It is not 100% accurate but some birds do actually mimic other bird calls including jays and starlings. I stopped to listen to a song thrush this morning which was just wonderful to hear.

It’s very good for being able to tell which warblers are around, they’re often hard to see and tend to be ‘little brown jobs’ - their songs are often more distinctive.