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The good news last night was that the mistress concluded we wouldn’t go to dog training this week. I know I should be excited about seeing all the other dogs but it is winter and I’ve got a fire to sit by and if I am being honest, two of them were Jack Russells. Now sitting by the fire set me thinking more about the design for my den. I think I want it to have a little fireplace, as I do so like to lie in front of the fire at home. The only problem with this would be that I would have to ask the master to come and light the fire for me as I haven’t quite got the hang of that yet and he does so enjoy doing it. I have practised rubbing two sticks together but not got a spark yet and I find my paws a bit clumsy for the matches. The fact that I had peed on the cardboard I was trying to use to get it started probably didn’t help. I wasn’t really planning to make the den high enough for the master to get in, that would be much more work but I may have to reconsider. Do you think beavers take on other projects apart from dams? I think I am going to need to bring in some help.
I don’t like to publicise this in case it becomes more widespread, but I think our bird table is being used as a sort of ‘singles bar’. Now I could just be imaging it but from my observation, and I have a pretty good vantage point where I can lie quite comfortably with my head on my paw and see the bird table, anyway, it would seem that a lot of birds seem to turn up on their own but then fly away a little while later in pairs. At this rate there could be a serious amount of nest building going on shortly. I just hope Matilda the cat next door hasn’t been watching as well. Mind you Matilda is an Australian cat and I don’t think she thinks much of the weather round here and isn’t all that keen to go out. Going back to the birds, do you think I could supplement my pocket money by helping them a bit? If I took down a few details of the sort of characteristics they were looking for, you know the sort of thing; species, age range, temperament and so on, I could then start helping with the introductions to other suitable birds. Robin has certainly been looking a bit lonely, maybe I could find him a partner. Alternatively I could set up a sort of ‘speed dating’ for birds. If I could find 20 males and 20 females they could all rotate round the table and see if they wanted to see any of the others again. I might have to ask the buzzard and the carrion crows if they would mind not taking part.