Trust

For years we have trusted our hen house loft resident beech marten to behave him/herself but in the last few weeks it has become apparent that it is no longer alone and probably has young to be fed. On very hot days, it comes down from the loft and lies in a shady part of the neighbouring shed and watches us go by and if it doesn't approve, is quite vocal in letting us know. We can get to within 2 meters of it, before it will move. Now with the discovery of chicken claws, we have had to take action.

Using a very heavy but totally harmless trap, we have caught three and they have been removed from our property. Quite surprisingly we didn't catch a single one of our five cats. It is probably only a matter of time before a new one moves in but Angie has tried as well as possible to block the entrances to the loft. We were thankfully aided by a specialist in such matters and our anonymous thanks to him/her.

I don't think the beech marten is known in the UK but it is the most common type around here and called the stone marten (Steinmarder). In many respects very similar to the pine marten. They are well known for the huge amount of damage they do to car engines, seemingly loving the rubber hoses and belts. One used to say that if you had a resident marten in your car engine, it wasn't a problem. He simply enjoyed the heat of a warm engine on a cold winter night - the danger came if you spent a night away from home and a foreign marten used the empty bed. On returning home, your marten smelt the intruders presence and then went mad. Increasingly manufacturers have been putting metal coverings on hose-pipes and I suspect that nowadays with the trend to fill the top of the engines with gleaming plastic covers and to similarly seal the bottoms and use less fluffy looking insulation in the engine bonnet (hood -USA), one hears less about the problem.

Talking of trust, the shop in the Blip is in Ottobeuren. It sells garden decoration type things and very nice too. The photo was taken at 7:45pm after closing time. All the stuff in the photo is left out at night and at the weekends. You can thus admire some of the trendy "rust" figures with their price tags attached, many costing 200€+.

One of the aspects of living in Bavaria which I always found attractive is how safe it feels. Now I know one should only trust the statistics that one has falsified oneself, but year for year Bavaria is shown to be the safest state, Munich the safest city, in Germany. A bit worrying for me as a foreigner (or even more so for my neighbours), is that 60% of all crimes in Bavaria are thought to be committed by foreigners! Interestingly in the former East German states where the nationalist anti-foreigners/refugees movement has the strongest following, the % is more than reversed with between 66% and 83% of suspects being German. 

The Bavarian police have a reputation for not being over tolerant but I have never witnessed any heavy handedness. Bavaria has the highest solved crimes rate (66%) compared to the average 54% in Germany.

The number of people put behind bars in Bavaria is about 64 for every 100,000 inhabitants which is lower than the 78 average for all Germany and considerably less than the 146 in the UK or 693 in the USA!! However they are not #1 in the world - the Seychelles beat them with 799. Explain that statistic please.

I do worry about posting such Blips - the past has shown that whenever I do, within 24 hours something happens to prove me wrong! I will simply have to put my trust in Flash and Luna. Seeing a policeman or patrol around here is as likely as winning in the lottery.