Birds meet glass

Living in the country brings all sorts of wildlife encounters, but last week's was one of the oddest yet.  It was a warm evening, and we left the back door open while we went out to the summerhouse for ten minutes or so.  The back hallway opens straight into the dining room, and on the dining room windowsill is a clear glass bowl, about the size and shape of a small goldfish bowl.  It's purely decorative and contains nothing but a scrap of pink ribbon that was dropped in there and forgotten about.  But when we came back inside from the summerhouse it contained - a swallow.  It was alive, and apparently unhurt, but having presumably flown into the bowl it was unable to turn around and get out through the relatively narrow neck.  Being upside down in a glass bowl clearly wasn't part of its plans for the evening, so we took the bowl outside and tipped it out; it flew off, greatly relieved I imagine, but we had a brief opportunity to see its lovely colouring and markings (I never realised that they have white dots around the tail).  We suppose that it flew indoors in search of a nest site, but goodness knows why it flew into the bowl; did it think the ribbon was a tasty butterfly?

Two other birds encountered glass in the past couple of weeks.  Two woodpeckers (great-spots) had a fight and chase across the garden, and one of them slammed into one of the summerhouse windows (it probably thought it could fly straight through and out one of the other windows).  It lay in the long grass at the side and I feared the worst, but after a while it sat up and eventually took itself off, presumably with a big headache.  (What is it with woodpeckers and our summerhouse windows?  The old summerhouse once claimed two woodpecker fatalities in as many weeks.)  Less fortunate was a dunnock, found dead with a broken neck under one of the side windows.  Interestingly these were all adult birds; usually it's the youngsters that make that mistake.

There are plenty of young birds now in the garden.  A family of three young blackbirds, all independent, have been around one side of the garden while a male has been feeding two younger ones at the other side.  The male is known as 'Tailless Dad'; he seems to have had a close encounter with (probably) one of the local cats but, despite losing his tail and some other feathers (these were left under one of the gooseberry bushes, so he was probably ambushed there) and occasionally favouring one leg, he seems to be functioning fine.  Robins are feeding little ones in deep cover and there have been a couple of little sparrows down on the patio; a family of goldfinches has also been in the hawthorn tree.  The status of the bluetits in the nestbox is still uncertain; the adults have been going in and out, but, as in the past, not frequently enough to suggest a viable nest.  Has our use of the summerhouse put them off?

They're not yet producing young, but the swallows, swifts and house martins are regularly feeding overhead.  And a red kite was hunting low over the garden one day.

Damselfly

Insect life is also taking off.  The big cotoneaster at the entrance to the drive has been humming with bees recently, as have the raspberry canes; the latter are attracting quite a variety of bees (I wish I was better at identifying them).  The warm weather brought out the damselflies over the pond, both the electric blue and the red ones; these are the best photos I could manage (you have to look closely!).  We've had a pair of red admiral butterflies and both large and small whites, as well as orangetips and some smaller ones that I couldn't see closely enough; and this evening there were two hawkmoths feeding on the sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis).  They were moving too fast for me to identify them, but they were too small for hummingbird hawkmoths; perhaps elephant hawkmoths?  I did see one a few days ago and got a flash of pink as it went past, so it's possible.

So much wildlife, that the plantlife will have to wait for another post!