As a child, one thing I inherited from my mother was a love of wildlife, particularly birds. I have spent many happy hours over the years watching the comings and goings in my own garden, just as my mother did in hers and shared with me and as I have shared with my daughter.
As well as feeders and a rickety bird table, I have three birdbaths in my garden and it always makes me laugh when someone sends a message to the starlings that it is bath time. They come together in a noisy rabble, throwing the water everywhere and being thuggish. Usually at the same time the robin will appear and stand underneath the edge of the birdbath, having a shower and avoiding the rowdy crowd above. The robins are nesting in our garden this year, (last year they were next door which I took personally) and whilst they are Christmas card perfect in appearance, they are the assassins of the garden and fiercely defensive of their plot.
The collar doves and pigeons have a complete lack of building skills in common. Two sticks across a branch junction and Mr. Pigeon says “Ta-daaaah!”, expecting Mrs. P to lay an egg or two, raise the children and safely see her way through to the end of summer. I get great pleasure seeing the blue tits return to the nest box year after year and raise yet another brood of fluffy ping pong ball-like babies that all fledge together but spend the preceding two hours peeping out and deciding who is brave enough to go first whilst the parent birds sit nearby cheeping encouragement.
The undoubted star of my garden theatre is my blackbird. I feed him daily (sometimes twice if hubby isn’t watching the batty old woman talking to the birds) with a mixture of grated cheese, chopped grapes, sultanas and meal worms. I open the back door and rattle the feed tray, calling for him. If he is within blackbird earshot he will appear on the fence. He checks the coast is clear and follows the same flight path every evening, landing on the shed roof barely two feet away from me as I fill the bird table with his supper. At the beginning of the year, he will feed hungrily until he almost grounds himself but as the year moves on and Mrs. Blackbird begins to sit on the nest, he will take her some supper too. Then the eggs hatch and they both come eagerly to the table to fill their beaks and back to the nest to ram it down the kids’ throats. At this stage I’m always careful what I put out and how big the pieces are – I would hate to be responsible for a choking incident!
The unfortunate downside of all these lovely birds in the garden is that occasionally we get a visit from the sparrow hawk. A majestic bird with speed and stealth on its side, it too has hungry chicks to feed. The female is bigger than the male and has distinctive yellow legs. She too follows the same flight path on each visit and comes over the back fence like a missile and away in a cloud of feathers, usually an unsuspecting starling. The garden goes instantly silent and will remain so for some hours. Then gradually the sparrows reappear, tentatively at first, followed by the starlings as life returns to normal with hungry beaks to feed and territories to defend. A little glimpse of the circle of life in my very own back garden.