Ipernity Nos 2001-4000

I am curious whether the maternal instinct which has women cooing over kittens and puppies, extends to young field mice, or are they all jumping on chairs yelling, kill them, kill them?! I figure so long as they hang out in the fields and don't eat too many of our veggies, better there than in the attic! By the way if you feed birds, mice will be living only yards away from the bottom of the feeders...

The Common Treecreeper is like a feathered mouse which climbs in spirals up the trunk of one tree before flying down to start on the next one. Its speckled brown plumage provides excellent camouflage but the silvery-white underparts may give it away, unless it is on silver birch, as it is here... Other features to look for are its long pale eyestripes, slender down-curved bill and black-edged golden wing-bar sometimes glimpsed as it flies. Bird-watching lesson for today ends!

Robin in the courtyard garden

Forgotten trove found when applying potash to some of the beds for this year's veggies. Lifting up the cover, I disturbed a fieldmouse, which leapt out in a panic with three young still attached to her, and then reappeared to try and face me off, to collect two more of her tiny offspring. They live in the fields - live and let live, so long as they aren't indoors, chewing through the wiring and the pipes.

Some IDs would be great if there are some experts out there who know one fossil from another. I am particularly interested in finding out what the centre creature was. Top right is a Bivalve of some sort, and top left and bottom right look as if they were in the snail family. Bottom left id on the tip of my tongue, but I have forgotten the name for the moment!

Fine Touch Filtered, on right