Home thoughts

I hadn't intended staying at home listening to the cricket. I was still feeling guilty about having spent the fresh, sunny day after the storms listening to the Test Match yesterday but I allowed myself the excuse that I'd spent most of the night listening to the storm, including listening to the crow shouting defiance into the teeth of the worst of the wind just before dawn. I didn't see him again until teatime, he must have been as knackered as I was. Anyway, I wasn't doing that today. Then I looked at the options, bearing in mind that I'd want to avoid any city centres on Bank Holiday Saturday and I didn't fancy the crowds at the Trafford Centre bus station and decided I'd listen to the cricket.

The day started with the local female sparrowhawk visiting the garden. I don't know that she was successful — a blackbird darted out of the rowan as she darted in then she spent a while galumphing round in a hazel bush before disappearing. A couple of magpies were into the rowan almost the moment she left it and within a minute a flock of spadgers had descended on the feeders. 

The juvenile goldfinch that was being fed by its mother earlier in the week has hooked up with the spadgers and seems to be being treated as a junior partner rather like they do the young blue tits. Now they've got the hang of things the juvenile blue tits have joined the adults in the mixed tit flock with the great tits. The long-tailed tits join in every so often but they tend to plough their own furrow even in Winter. The robin's singing, or rather a robin's singing, I suspect it's this year's oldest.

Today's the first day in well over a month I've had double figures of species of birds in the back garden. The twelfth for the day was the ring-necked parakeet that's been flying around all week. It's been a flyover rather than a visitor to the garden so far, I'm still not sure how I'd feel about it becoming a regular. It would give the squirrels a bit of competition for the last of the hazel nuts, all I've managed to get for myself is a few empties. We'll say nothing about the cherries and pears that get eaten when they're only a quarter grown.

As I had a post-match walk down to the shop (England won), a flock of seventeen parakeets flew down the road, screeching all the way. And I counted fifty-seven pigeons roosting under what we used to call "the Quicks for Ford" bridge because that's what was advertised on it for the best part of forty years until the newly-privatised Network Rail realised nobody had paid for the advertising since Johnny Ray was in the Hit Parade.

As the sun sets slowly in the West…