Last weekend we spent an hour counting the garden birds. It’s easier said than done when they won’t actually keep still. I’d stand there and say I’ve seen 6 robins and my Mistress would say, no there were definitely only three that kept moving around. We do it as part of the RSPB’s ‘Big Bird Watch’ that helps them know if the population of garden birds is increasing or declining. We picked a good hour as it turned out. How many people will be able to report that they had a pheasant in the garden at the right moment? However, what it did reveal is that we have probably put the nest box up for the wrong types of birds. We only saw one blue tit and we weren’t envisaging it as a property for a single bird. We were more hoping for it to become a family residence. We did however see four pairs of chaffinches, but they would never get through the tiny hole on the front of the box. To be quite fair looking at the males I said to my Mistress that it looked decidedly as though we might be overfeeding the birds. They had very rotund waistlines. In fact frankly, you couldn’t see their waste at all.
Today there are some men in the garden trimming some hedges and trees. It’s all very well but the girls get quite excited in that situation and we have to go for toilet breaks one at a time so we don’t get in the way. The more frustrating to Shadow and Megan is that they want to run off with the bits of tree that have been cut off but aren’t being allowed to. My Mistress has said that if they are good she might keep one or two pieces for them to play with.