Home thoughts

Friday morning I slept the sleep of the dead and woke up feeling like the wreck of the Hesperus so I took the hint and had a reading day despite the good weather. Last night's sleep was different again with my listening to the lesser black-backs setting out for a day's marauding before finally dozing off just before six. Despite that and the weather I thought I'd best get a walk in. Stagecoach buses are on strike this weekend until Tuesday so that limited my options today. They were even more limited when the trains stopped running until teatime. I gave in, sometimes Fate has all the cards.

I'm being ambivalent about the wildlife in the garden at the moment. I've not seen the hedgehogs for a month and the slugs have eaten all my cabbages and half the cat's dinners given half a chance. The squirrels have eaten all the hazelnuts and chewed nearly all the cherries before they were ripe (I shared a half cherry with a blackbird). On the other hand, the sparrows have been working like Trojans picking the aphids off the roses and soft fruit with the help of assorted titmice. 

I appear to have committed a faux pas with the bird food: I've filled the mesh feeders with suet pellets. The fat balls disappear at a rate of three a day, suet blocks last a couple of days, half a pound of sunflower seeds three days. The pellets have lasted nearly a week and look likely to be there another fortnight. In Winter they disappear as fast as the seed but not in high Summer when all the starlings are out on the stubble fields of the Mersey Valley. I'm guessing that the pellets are too hard for comfort as far as the spadgers and titmice are concerned and they need the starlings to give the pellets a bit of hammer to make them suitably crumbly. If I can remember to do it I'll test the hypothesis by having at the next bag of pellets with a rubber mallet before filling the feeder.

It's late teatime and the lesser black-backs are drifting back to roost. It's been a quiet weekend for black-headed gulls, I've only seen odd ones and twos this far. I know of at least two breeding colonies that were devastated by avian flu, I wonder if this Winter's numbers will reflect the impact of this epidemic.