IT SOMETIMES takes me a while to respond to inquiries and there may be many reasons why this is so.
Sometimes I can't quite read or decipher the writing on your letters! So I had a very interesting inquiry from Catherine Foster of Cartmell Road in Sheffield 8.

She had been to a farm and been able to see a harvest mouse. It is just about possible that you might see one in the wild on a farm.

But the problem was that I just couldn't make out which farm she had visited. It looked like White Past Farm and I just couldn't think where that might be.

Anyway, with a bit of help from Google I found it: White Post Farm, Mansfield Road, Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire, NG22 8HL. There's also a website at www.whitepost farmcentre.co.uk . It looks really interesting and has a farm shop plus lots of farm animals and pets and more.

So if you do visit please let me know how you get on and if you see the harvest mice.

Closer to home for most of us are Heeley City Farm, Whirlow Hall Farm, and of course the Rare Breeds Centre at Graves Park; all excellent for a day out. Let me know if there are any others I should know about.

Well, that's the good news Catherine, but here's the not so good. Following their trip to White Post Farm, Catherine and her husband had a little visitor to their garden, a small mouse with long tail and long back legs, a fairly blunt nose and quite small ears; not how they imagined a typical mouse.

It was also rather small and they asked: "Could it be a harvest mouse?" Well, it would be very nice to think it was. A few years ago somebody sent a photograph of a harvest mouse coming to a garden feeder, but in a more rural area. I think this is a young wood mouse, also called a field mouse.

Not so rare but nice to see.

There are a few other interesting wildlife sightings at the moment and it is a good time if the weather is reasonably warm for late butterflies such as red admiral and peacock, and for the big dragonflies too. One butterfly that is around is the speckled wood, which is quite large and chocolate brown with cream mottling.

Once very rare with us, it has moved northwards.

It was this species that Philip Helliwell contacted me about. He sent pictures of "a butterfly which flew into my kitchen and after fluttering about for a while settled on the window and posed for some time.

"This butterfly has been around for a few days and I believe I saw it with another butterfly, possibly mating. It also flew into my raspberry patch, which is well populated by wild flowers i.e. weeds. I live close by you at Little Norton and have a good camera but unfortunately my abilities don't match it.

"However, I think the photos will be good enough for ID purposes. I have looked in my books but cannot match it. Due to the eyespots I think it's probably a brown or maybe a heath. It also looks a bit like a marbled white, so if all else fails I'll call it a marbled brown."

I think the idea of a marbled brown is rather nice and a great name. It looks like a brown but is actually a white.