With Intent

Can you do the birdfeeders this morning? she yelled over her shoulder as she clattered down the stairs.  It is a commuting day and Mr B is still in bed.  On commuting days F has a list she rattles through before flinging herself out the door: shower, feed ME, make a cuppa and deliver it upstairs, clean my litter tray, pack her lunch, check she has phones, spectacles, train tickets, music (choir days), do the dishes left from last night and gulp down her tea.

I sit by the French doors overlooking the lawn and the birdfeeders.  3 crows are lined up watching F through the kitchen window.  That robin is sitting on the fence also keeping tabs on the human activity indoors.  It is light early now and the sun is nearly above our horizon... 

"Oh, alright" she mutters and stumbles out to the garage, a corner of which is stocked with buckets of suet pellets, fat balls, birdseed, sunflower hulls and mealworms.  When she re-emerges, the crows don't even fly away.  These days they just hop a retreat a bit further up the lawn.  The robin never did fly away; way too familiar for its own good.  I eye it with intent.  One day it will get lazy, fat and lazy, and feel far too safe.....

F turns her back on the restocked bird feeders and the suet flung at the lawn and before she is even back down the steps onto the patio the crows are scouring the grass, the feeders are swamped with starlings, and sparrows and tits flock into the apple tree to take turns at the caged feeders reserves for small birds.  The robin and the blackbirds examine the ground for tidbits scattered there but the wood pigeons bully their way in and hoover up ground food.  We need to design a ground feeder cage; something that strains the supply of wood pigeons out of the general flow of avian life, but doing that will likely also exclude the pair of magpies that dash about opportunistically.  They are wary of the crows but are attracted to the same food.

The crows often fill their beaks with bones or lumps of suet then take off, struggling to climb at a steep enough angle to clear the house before veering suddenly through the gap between the house and garage.  One of them has a blonde spot on its back.  We have also seen the crows carefully burying lumps of food in the lawn and in the garden, and we really wonder whether they remember all the places they have hidden their stashes.  Maybe they are feeding the earthworms they will later eat as 'fresh' food.

There is nothing wrong with 'farming your food'.  My fresh food reserves live in the bottom of the compost heap - field mice.  They come out to eat fallen bird seed. They will get fat and complacent too, and then either I or the fox will make a tasty meal of them later.

Driving home from the allotment