The deer are feeling right at home in the garden, walking through, nibbling on this and that. I went out and shouted at it when I saw it eating one of the new dogwood bushes. It glared at me and walked a few steps further away, but didn’t really seem very bothered.

A mama deer with its kid passed through the garden again this evening. They nibbled at various things (cherry branches, the round thujas, hydrangea flowers). Interestingly they ignored the clover patch.

The kid has lost its spots by now and simply looks like a smaller version of the adult one, though it lifts its back “feet” extra high when walking through grass.

I wonder if this is the same mama deer who was here with its two kids earlier, and she’s lost one. Or maybe it’s a different pair; there’s probably more than one deer family roaming around Spånga.

One of the neighbourhood cats is thirsty, and has discovered that there is water in our pool. Several times now I’ve seen it jump up on the pool edge to drink. Its thirst has got to be pretty bad if the pool water – which is clean for a pool, but chlorinated and not sparkling fresh – is the best it can get.

I don’t like this much. I worry that the cat will slip and fall in and won’t be able to get out. At first I also worried that its claws would puncture the pool edge, which is made of rubber and already has a few (non-cat-related) leaks that we’ve patched. But if it hasn’t done so yet, it’s probably not going to, and in any case, we could probably patch those holes, too.

I’m also impressed that it found the water. It must have smelled the water with enough precision to realize that jumping up on that blue/gray thing would help it reach the invisible water.

Anyway, I bought a bowl for the cat – and for any other thirsty cats or creatures. I forgot to fill it up since the weekend, though, and it was mostly empty today, so I found the cat back at the pool. Now I’ve filled up the bowl again.

If you have an outdoors cat, make sure you provide it with water during the day, and preferably in a shaded place!

The day before yesterday, a roe deer walked through our garden with its fawn. Deer walking in the garden is no news, it happens often enough. But this was the first time I saw one with a newborn fawn this close.

After the two crossed most of the garden, I saw another fawn come out of the lilac hedge! Very cute.

Then they went off across the road and that was that, I thought.

Today, as I was finishing my lunch out on the deck, I suddenly noticed that one of the fawns had been lying in the tall grass under our cherry tree during my entire lunch, only 5 metres away from me. It was so quiet and immobile that I hadn’t noticed it at all until I happened to look at that exact spot.

Mama deer came by a few times in the afternoon, and I saw them in a few different places in the evening.

I mostly tried to stay out of the garden today. If I was too visible, I was afraid mama deer might not dare come back to feed the baby. And I wouldn’t want to have a fawn starve because of me.

They left in the evening, probably to move to some other garden in the neighbourhood.

Deer look cute but they are marauders when it comes to plants. No tulips would survive in this garden, and deer have repeatedly eaten my pansies in the past.

This time mama deer took big bites from my strawberry plants, right under my eyes. I normally cover the strawberries with netting but hadn’t had time to put up nets for this summer yet. I’d forgotten that the nets protect against deer as well, I was mostly thinking of them as protecting the berries from birds.

I quickly threw on the nets today, on the strawberry boxes as well as the one where we planted peas. And just in time – the pea sprouts are just becoming visible. If pea shoots are a delicacy for us humans, how much more delicious might deer find them? They would probably leave nothing behind.

I have mixed feelings about deer. I like wildlife of all kinds, and I like seeing animals in the garden. Squirrels and hares and deer, and birds of course. I wish there were hedgehogs around here.

I don’t like them eating the things I care about.

On balance, though, I’d rather have a garden without tulips than a garden without deer.

This is the curious cat that I often see nosing around the garden. (Not the new young one who tried to fish for baby birds in the nesting box, but a more regular visitor.) And the house, too: if the doors to the deck are open, it tends to come inside.

I like cats. I like this cat, too. Even if it hunts little birds. But I don’t want it to make the inside of our house a part of its territory.

Speaking of birds, I’ve had a blue tit in the house twice in the last week, or maybe two different ones. The first time it flew into the ficus tree, and was relatively easy to chase out from there because it’s near the double doors to the deck. The second time it flew into the next room and got confused and slightly panicked by the windows there, but I got it out without much trouble.

And of course there is an endless stream of bees, bumblebees and wasps who fly in and then can’t find their way back out again. Windows.

There’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it out of the house.

We’ve seen its like before. One spring, a young cat out for the first time when its family had gone away from the day, came into our house looking completely lost and abandoned. So much so that we thought it might have run away and took it to a nearby vet to scan its chip and find out who it belonged to. He turned out to be called Sid, and lived just two houses away from us.

Sid and his family have moved away, but there are several other cats whom I recognize by sight. They are all older and feel more at home in the neighbourhood. They walk in a very different manner – more confidently and purposefully.

One thing the young and old cats apparently all have in common is a love of birds. Not our kind of love, but the kind that expresses itself in hunting and eating the birds. This kitty quickly discovered the bird nest box up in our cherry tree and decided to go fish for baby birds. Climbed up and poked its paw inside the box and tried to catch things.

When I had chased it down from the tree with a broom twice over, I had enough and decided to saw off the branch that seemed to offer it best access to the nest box. (It was mostly dead anyway.) I’m hoping that this will make bird-fishing less comfortable for the cat, so the cat will find some other fun activity and leave the box alone.

That neighbourhood cat that has made itself at home beneath our bird feeder has knocked it over repeatedly in his attempts to catch the birds. The whole stand itself is bent and some parts are just plain broken.

We’ve tried to make the ground beneath the feeder uncomfortable for it, and to to raise the feeder higher, and so on, but the cat hasn’t gotten the point. So we took a step back, considered our options, and then Eric constructed a new, hopefully cat-proof feeder stand.

The new stand is much more stable and should be really hard to knock over. At the same time it is super easy to disassemble and pack away for the summer. And cheaper and more environmentally friendly and more easy to dispose of than the old one, too. Just superior in all ways, basically.

It’s too easy to just go out and buy a solution to your problem. “I want to have a bird feeder in my garden. Therefore I should buy one.” And you can do it from your desk or your phone and it even comes delivered to a pick-up point near you so you barely have to leave the home to get it. If it had been harder, then we might have made one ourselves to begin with.

Continuing from Lunndörren to Vålåstugan, 16 km. Beautiful colors everywhere.

There were patches of sparse birch forest here and there but otherwise today’s walk went mostly over bog and open heath. This area is also criss-crossed by a lot of rivers and streams: I counted four actual bridges, one fallen tree, and plenty of small footbridges.

There was a lot of bog to cross, and the plank paths across the bogs were in disgracefully bad shape. Missing planks, broken planks, saggy planks… In the worst places the planks just served as an easy channel for the bog water, so the path became a stream and I was walking through water deep enough to cover the foot of my boots. It was better than no path at all, because at least my feet were not sinking into the mud. But my feet were already quite wet before I had even come halfway.

The weather today was wet and cold – above freezing, but not by much. A light rain fell through the entire day. Around midday the wind started picking up and by the afternoon the gusts were around 20 m/s. Wise from last year’s snowy weather, I had brought my wooly winter hat and thick mittens and was very glad to have them. My waterproof layers did their job so apart from my feet I was mostly dry, but the constant cold wind was chilling. I wasn’t actually cold at any point because I kept moving (and had I been wearing any more layers I would have been sweating) but I could feel my body heat leaking away.

I stopped for a very brief snack break behind the same lone rock as last year. It is so conveniently situated right at the halfway point between these two huts, and it is literally the only thing I saw all day that is large enough to offer shelter from the wind. With its little overhang it even protected me from the rain (which was falling diagonally because of the wind). But it was still far from pleasant there so I kept my break short – just a flapjack and some hot drink – and kept on walking instead. Better to get to the hut sooner and get a proper meal there.

Towards the end of today’s walk I thought several times that I recognized the place and was nearly there, but behind each softly undulating hill there was another, very similar one. By the end I was running low on blood sugar and I was quite happy to arrive at the hut. The first thing I did was to hang up all my wet things to dry; the second thing was to finally eat lunch.

Today’s wildlife: a small group of reindeer, large flocks of what may have been common redpolls, and a beautiful bird that I guess must have been a Siberian jay. In the photos that Google finds for me, the Siberian jay looks grayish brown, but the one I saw had shades of green in its plumage, almost iridescent when the light hit it right. Wikipedia has an old picture of Siberian jays where the birds look a lot more like the impression I got, though, so I guess that’s what it must have been.

The cat doesn’t seem to mind scratchy fir branches at all and has made itself a nest in them. And keeps catching and eating little birds.

After several weekends of wanting to go for a walk but having to do other things, I actually got out today and walked section 5:3, from Hemfosa to Paradiset.

It was a beautiful day for walking – a few degrees below freezing, overcast but still relatively bright. The temperature has been below zero for a while so the ground was all firm rather than muddy. And the ground was covered with a fresh blanket of fluffy snow. I love walking on untouched snow, and that feeling of being alone in the forest.

There was a stretch in the middle where the trail went along roads, which I didn’t much enjoy, but most of it was pleasant walking through the usual fir-pine-bilberry-rock forests. This section of the trail is quite far from major roads and the commuter train lines, plus the snow muffled any remaining noises, so everything was wonderfully quiet.

The fresh snow and the lack footprints meant I could see a lot of paw prints instead. Fox, hare, squirrel, deer, and even moose I believe, plus tiny prints of unidentifiable tiny rodents.

All was great except lunch, which was very cold. My big mittens are warm and weatherproof but impossible to hold a spork with, so I had to switch to gloves, and even though I ate as fast as I possibly could, I felt like my fingers were going to turn into icicles and fall off. It took me a good while to get them warm again afterwards.

The last part of my walk went through the Paradiset nature reserve. I don’t know what it is about that place – it’s the usual pine forest over granite, but somehow it manages to look prettier than other similar forests. The moment I cross the boundary of the nature reserve, it’s like the pines become more elegant and the snow lies extra fluffy on their boughs. I noticed the same effect when section 3 crossed into the Tyresta national park.

The trail passes by Tornberget which is apparently the highest point in the greater Stockholm area. There’s a viewing tower with views of nearly endless flat pine forest in all directions. Uniform and not particularly interesting.

As usual the official distance is one thing and reality is different, what with having to actually get to and from the trail. The section starts where Sörmlandsleden crosses a public road, but it’s a kilometre from the train station to that spot. And the section ends in the middle of the forest, not even near a road of any kind, so there’s one kilometre to get to a road and then another to the nearest bus stop. In total the 15 km trail section became a 18 km walk. Starting at 9, finishing just before 15 – perfect use of daylight hours.