Lazy Saturday

I slept through the dawn chorus for the first time in over a week and woke to a bright sunny morning. For ten minutes, then the sky turned black for ten minutes, then sunny again, then cloudy. I watched the clouds scudding over and the wind rocking the trees and decided I'd have a lazy day of it.

I'd refilled the bird feeders yesterday and the spadgers and titmice had taken residence in the roses and fruit bushes to take advantage, the male great tit sitting on a stem of rambling rose, reaching out to the feeder and picking out a sunflower seed every time the wind blew it close enough. The sparrows worked a bit harder and the blue tits and coal tits put in some hard graft. I was hoping the chiffchaff that popped in first thing yesterday might come back in but it seems it was just taking a pitstop before moving on. There's been a bit of argy-bargy going on with the woodpigeons, I wonder what the story is behind the one with no tail feathers.

The field across the road looked deserted at first sight. First sight was deceptive: there were three dozen woodpigeons out there together with a few magpies and jackdaws and a couple of dozen starlings. It's the first time in a while there's only been single figures of magpies on there in the morning, the other day there were thirty-odd. There was a lot more starlings noises going on, in the end I found the source: sixty-odd of them crowded in the birch tree by the old youth centre. Judging by all the whooping and whistling they're on the move, certainly they were nowhere to be seen an hour later though the birds feeding on the field were still there.

Yet more starlings arrived at teatime, a couple of dozen suddenly appeared in the trees on the embankment, calling noisily to each other for a few minutes before disappearing stage right. A few minutes later another flock, forty-odd birds this time, flew in stage left, shouted at the clouds as it started pouring down then flew off to follow the others.

It occurs to me I might usefully revise the songs of blackcaps and garden warblers before it's their turn to make an appearance.