There are many different animals on our farm: Our five bantams, which provide the breakfast eggs for the Bed & Breakfast, live in the henhouse below the court. Occasionally, you can see a few cows grazing on the grassland beyond the farm buildings, and further down near the lakeshore, our neighbour keeps pigs. In and around the Oberhaus, you often come across our cat Luigi.
But the biggest animal population on the farm – apart from wild birds and insects – are probably the wall lizards. These small animals scurry swiftly across the paved garden paths and hide in the cracks of the garden walls. If you sit in the garden on a sunny day, you will occasionally see them sunbathing on a warm stone surface. They don’t mind the heat, after all they originally stem from Italy. They probably arrived here along the railway tracks. The ballast under the tracks is an ideal habitat for wall lizards. But they also like sun-exposed masonry, such as on our farm.
With their excellent climbing abilities, the lizards can easily escape from cats and other enemies into higher grounds. Should a hunter nevertheless succeed in grabbing them by the tail, the tail falls off and the lizard escapes anyway. On our farm, however, the wall lizards have nothing to fear. Our cat Luigi is too old for such games.