Brutal/dramatic nature

The overriding theme of the last week has been the brutality and drama of nature: dramatically wet weather, a huge landslide and some macabre finds in the woods.

To start, though, here are some pictures from the couple of windows of sunny weather that we were treated to during the week, brief as they were.

On Friday afternoon it was 17C and sunny.

It was hard to believe that a weekend of wall to wall rain was coming.

The garlic doesn't seems to mind the copious amounts of rain we've been having recently.

There was sunshine after the rain in Vellano.

Wild crocuses line the drive.

So, let's get onto the macabre. To start with, on Tuesday night we had fun and games with Reggie – something outside on the terraces had clearly upset him and despite it pouring with rain and it being past midnight (way past his usual bedtime), he was intent on running around the garden barking incessantly and absolutely did not want to come in. We had two failed attempts at getting him to bed – we went through his usual bedtime routine, put him in his room, and by the time we got upstairs he had started whining and barking from his bedroom – and in the end resorted to leaving him to sleep in the living room on the sofa. He settled quite quickly after that, which is more than could be said for either of us. With Reggie loose in the living room we had to shut Florence into our bedroom with us (she likes to roam the house at night time and we didn’t want her accidentally wandering into Reggie’s jaws, so she was on lockdown with us), meaning that we were subjected to being jumped on, sat on and slept on all night, and to top it all off the rain turned into a tremendous storm, with thunder, lightning and the loudest rain (and hail) you can imagine. Not a good night’s sleep!!

The following morning, we began to build a picture of what had been upsetting Reggie the previous night: when Stuart set off to take him for a walk, he ran straight off to the terraces immediately below the car park and returned with a dead fox in his mouth! Thankfully, he deposited it on the patio outside the front door and then went off for his walk, allowing me (once I'd got over the initial shock of looking outside the door to see a lifeless fox lying prostrate on the patio) to bag it up for disposal. It was all a bit of a mystery to us – either it had died of natural causes or it had been killed by something (we could only imagine a wolf ) that wasn't interested in eating it. Either way, We guessed that Reggie had heard/smelled/seen/sensed the presence of the fox (and its possible killer) the previous night, and that explained his extreme agitation.

Reggie's first find of the week.

The next morning, on setting out for his daily walk, Reggie once again headed straight off to the terraces below the house, this time to the edge of the orto, just beneath the poly tunnel, and came back bearing a deer leg which had been stripped to the bone bar the very bottom part and hoof. This really did seem like the work (and leftovers) of wolves, so we assumed that the fox may have been some form of collateral damage - perhaps it had got in the way of the wolves or dared to attempt to share some of their kill.

Over the next few days Reggie continued to make gruesome finds on his daily walks, and the tally currently stands at: 1x dead fox, 1x deer leg, 1x entire fox tail, 1x partial fox tail and 1x deer head. All within the last 7 days.

We are well aware of the fact that wolves are present in our valley, and we have found some evidence of deer kills on our land on two previous occasions, so it doesn't come as a complete surprise. What perhaps was a little more unexpected was the proximity to the house of Reggie's finds. Of course it's entirely possible that the pieces he found had been dispersed from a kill site elsewhere, moved by scavengers (indeed the latest find - the deer head - came from the woods further along the drive), but we will now be on the lookout for other tracks and traces and see what we find.

So, onto the dramatic side of nature: the weather. Save for the brief windows of sunshine shown in the photos at the start of this post, it was pretty much wet all week long, and roughly halfway through the week we became aware of the fact that the weather anticipated for Sat/Sun was so bad that a red weather alert had been issued for our area. In fact, by the time the weekend arrived the alert had been downgraded to "just" orange (weather alerts increase in severity from green, to yellow, to orange, to red), but we still expected some heavy downpours and a frustratingly unproductive weekend.

In the clouds.

Bored of being stuck indoors.

In the event, the rain was less Armageddon-like than we had been expecting – we've certainly had much harder rain in the past – but it was very much sustained, with no let-up, and clearly the volume of water that has fallen in recent weeks has had a cumulative and devastating effect: we were somewhat shocked when we stepped outside the front door on Sunday afternoon (to take Reggie out for a wet walk) to look up and see part of the hillside opposite us missing...

That wasn't there before.

What looks like a very muddy, very steep ski slope is, in fact, a landslide – which, thankfully, is on a slightly different aspect of the hillside from the house of our friends Mara & Franco (while the landslide is very close to their house – directly above and behind it – there is a gully/ravine in between their part of hill and the affected part).

When the cloud lifted we could see just how close the landslide is to the house that's positioned up on that part of the hill.

Thankfully, the house perched up on the hill up there is a little way back from the edge, but clearly part of the land in front of the house is in a perilous state, and we can't imagine how the inhabitants of the house must have felt when it happened - and how they continue to feel, especially with yet more rain forecast.

So, thanks to the rain we spent the weekend feeling utterly stir crazy, but we were (and are) thankful that stir crazy was the most extreme feeling we had to face.

Each time Reggie goes out into the garden to bark at things, Florence makes the most of the brief window of dog-free safety to come and sit by the fire. 

Reggie would like another crisp, please.

(This blog post covers the week 5-11 March 2018.)