After one night of no takers at all for the food, we now can report "Operation Stop The Cat Burglary" a full success. The hedgehog feeding station is cat-proof, probably to the dismay of the two toms who went for self-service, and has been used, as planned, by the little hedgehog.

At least this morning there was no more food on the plate (instead I found a lovingly placed piece of hedgehog shit). And even the camera worked well enough to catch a little glimpse of the prickly little lady entering and leaving her restaurant. 

And now I have to run to the post office (to drop off packed orders) and to the vet (to pick up some meds for Madame, who gets old and now has developed some thyroid issues) and to the Milchhäusla (to get some more milk, and possibly some regional strawberries). Good thing there's such a thing as bicycles!

(I used to walk to the next post drop-off point, but that has closed a while ago, and every other one in the area requires either a longer-than-I-can-afford-on-a-workday walk, or a short ride of the bike.)

 So we made the entrances to the hedgehog restaurant a little smaller... and no, it did not help at all. This is the hungry cat just about to enter the restaurant:

We had the camera set to take a photo every three seconds, but it is a little disagreeable and only shot every seven seconds. So obviously, we missed a lot, and that is the only frame where you can see more than the tip of the tail lying in the entrance. Not a single shot with a hedgehog either.

Which means there's two things on the task list now, one, to add some nice curved tunnel to the entrances, and two, to fiddle with the camera settings again... 

This is, supposedly, a hedgehog feeding station with a cat-proof design. Which means that a hedgehog can enter, and leave, and there's two entrances/exits so if two should happen to go in there at the same time, a route to run away is still open to each of them. (Hedgehogs are not social, as a rule.)

The inside has two partitioning walls so it's like something that dreams of being a labyrinth one day. But, well, you know, it's not complicated enough yet. That is supposed to make it cat-proof, because even if a cat is able to stick their head in, they would not crawl in all the way, with only 10 cm of door height, and then contort themselves around the inner walls to reach the food plate.

Well, well, well. My aunt kindly borrowed us her wildlife camera, and after seeing this:

I'm not so sure anymore about that "cat-proof" thing. The cat goes inside until just the tip of the tail sticks out, and then the data cuts off.

We know that cat, it's a slim, rather young-looking tom with a very beautiful ginger tabby fur. Apparently he's trying to work on the "slim" part with enthusiasm... 

So we'll have to find a way to pimp the cat-proofness. Maybe add something so the entrance is more like a tunnel? That would make slipping inside more awkward.

You know this thing where you have a schedule roughly planned for a specific day,  or some specific days, and you know from experience that you will probably not be able to finish everything, much less do some extra task? And yet somehow you still believe you will do that extra task anyways?

That's exactly what happened to yesterday's blog post, aka "the extra task". The car had to go for a checkup, and I was going to see my parents and help a little with a few things, and as expected the day flew by without me getting around to blogging. I could have known. 

And now you are getting a blog post to let you know that I will be properly away for a few days - and I'm not planning to make the same mistake again right away. I will be off to give a workshop for museum volunteers in beautiful Switzerland... and I will be back here on the blog on Wednesday. 

While I'm away, on Sunday the 18th, it's International Museum Day, so you might find something interesting special museum event in your area. There's a (German language) website with an interactive map here. I hope you find something, and have fun!

Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - the little cat gave us a not-so-little health scare, and that ate the weekend and my extra brain capacity yesterday.

Fortunately she is much better again, and it was not something utterly serious like a tumour, but "only" a very severe eye infection. 

And yes, you are getting a cat pic.

The vet confirmed our estimate that she must be around 20 years old now, so we always hear the clock ticking softly in the background. For now, though, she is mostly back to her normal self, keen on food (more than would be good for her), often up for a cuddle, and moving slowly and with care - no wonder, as she's almost blind at this point.

Well. Nothing utterly new, or such things. I'm more or less trying to prep the next event (a workshop for a volunteer group at a museum), get the image database updated and finally transferred to the new system (fingers crossed nothing will explode there), and try to get more done on the other open or have-to-be-maintenanced things.

Yesterday evening was mainly spent on preparing a new batch of cat food, so Madame can go on having food she enjoys (a little too much, at times), and we spent part of our lunch break today outside photo-hunting insects and obsidentifying them.

Have I mentioned that app before? It's what we use these days to identify plants or animals that we don't know. It's usually quite good and quite reliable - sometimes there are hallucinations, but these are typically easy to catch. The app is called "Obsidentify", here's the website with information about it, and by using it you become a citizen scientist (or, in this case, more a citizen science minion) helping to track species and, via that, climate change and other changes in habitats.

We now know that there's a special kind of aphids hanging out on willows. In our case, that's also the meeting place and orgy location for a lot of Asian Ladybugs... or, as we call it, the "Ladybug Swinger Club".

The little hedgehog is about ready to roam free again - with continued support in form of food offers. (There's just too few insects out and about for them to find enough food when just foraging. Feel free to google about the loss of insect mass in the last years, but sit down before you do.) So we built a cat-safe hedgehog food station and it had the first trial run yesterday.

This morning, when I went to take out the food bowl, I found this: 

I had not thought that hedgehogs were such scathing restaurant critics! Good thing the little prickly lady does not have internet access, or we'd probably have found a zero star google review as well.

(Hedgehog station told me that they quite like to do that. I guess it's no problem when you are roaming and just drop your thank-you where you ate the bugs, but dropped in a plate, it does have a defintitive comical value.)