the pigs won't eat broccoli

but they love apples, carrots and cucumber and they especially love banana

we have fallen into a routine:  breakfast is dropped off at the manpig's estate, the ladypig waddles out with me to the oak tree to snorkel for acorns then returns to remodel the interior of her home

I can now tell the cats apart - this is mainly because the one who's been getting five breakfasts daily since my arrival is now 'the fat one'

My Christmas projects have been to watch the 'Star Wars Trilogy' and to read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' - all this catching up with the latest in popular culture has emboldened me to consider finding out who the Spice Girls are and how to do a 'selfie'

did I mention the pigs?

the manpig has curly tusks - due to excessive boisterousness he lives in a secured enclosure, a sort of overgrown quarry with roman remains in the middle of it. The ladypig lives separately in a wooden house encircled by a wire enclosure, inside the wooden house she has constructed a giant nest of hay.

She lets herself in and out of the enclosure via a spring door that she can manoeuvre with her body, she spends her days trundling around the garden, visiting the neighbouring olive grove or chatting to the boisterous one through his fence.

The pig owners met us briefly to discuss feeding schedules and health issues - they are concerned that the ladypig seems unfeasibly fat and are sure that it's down to her lack of exercise - the Man and I have a strong suspicion that her fatness is due to soon-to-arrive piglets.

This morning the ladypig and I walked down to the oak tree for an acorn-ey breakfast accompanied by cucumber and carrot, she looks even bigger than she did yesterday and she made a very nice leafy nest for her afternoon nap.

I've been scanning the interweb for pig-mid-wifery tips: rubber gloves and iodine and  a special piglet box need to be on hand.

I've run out of cats

until mid-November

to fill the void in my life I went online and arranged to look after some pigs

in Italy

over Christmas

One of them is dangerous - his food is lowered down to him in a bucket!

The Mouse Deer Whale Pig

The star attraction of the nature reserves are always the big cats. In Yala the leopard paparazzi flood into the national park every day hoping for a fleeting glimpse of the big spotty glamourpuss.

My own crush is on the much more mysterious and melancholic-sounding mouse deer. The books all describe this creature as secretive and solitary, the sole surviving member of the infraorder tragulina. It runs up low, shallow-angled branches to get itself into trees and it isn't really a deer at all, it is in fact more like a pig, especially in it's sexual behaviour.

The native name for the mouse deer translates as 'a deer and a pig' and my sense of it being stranded between species is reinforced by the wiki entry that says that it has

... a remarkable affinity with water often remaining submerged for prolonged periods to evade predators or other unwelcome intrusion. This has also lent support to the idea that whales evolved from water-loving creatures that looked like small deer

The Jesus Pig

Just beyond the bushes surrounding my cabin is a bright green lake, the luminosity of which led me to assume that it didn't support much life but I watched as horned cattle waded in to shoulder depth in the mornings, stood around for an hour or two then disappeared back into the bushes. I also saw some deliciously cartoon-ey storks standing in the lake and realised that a lot of birds come visiting here, so I got out my crayons and walked up the spit of sand that runs part-way into the lake to see them more closely.

Yesterday evening I climbed to a look-out post from which I could see the lake. The sand spit was covered with fat man-sized crocodiles, which made me gulp a bit, then I watched a pig emerge from the bushes, keeping up a steady trot, she made straight for the spit, slalomed between the crocs and when she got to the end of the land she kept going, running on the water without slackening her pace until she got to the island in the middle of the lake.

impressive surface tension!