We’ll come to the body in the bushes later, but we’ll start
with another, rather sad, body – that of a baby robin which flew into the patio
doors. It was our first sighting of a
fledgling from the patio robins’ nest. The
other robins, on the veg patch side of the garden, also had a fledgling which
was hiding in the apple cordons; I haven’t seen it since, although baby robins
are secretive little birds so lack of sightings doesn’t mean that it has come
to harm. We buried our little casualty
by the front wall, which is probably not too far from the nest where it hatched.
We’ve also had bothers with birds helping themselves to our
crops. The two plum tree pigeons have been
picking the embryo plums off the tree; at first we didn’t trouble too much, as
that pair are fairly relaxed about our presence and we didn’t want to frighten
them off, but one day we spotted six pigeons feeding in the tree, which was
just too much. I have a stash of old
CDs, from the days when companies used to send them out in the hope that people
would download their products (remember that?); I kept them as pigeon-scarers –
when hung up, they rotate in the wind and the sunlight flashes off them, which
birds don’t like. It seems to be
working. Once the plums grow larger, the
pigeons will lose interest in them and I can take the CDs down.
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| CD tree |
The male partridge is still periodically about (we assume
that the female is brooding eggs somewhere).
He too is very trusting of us, so I was unwilling to intervene too much
when he took a fancy to one of my lettuces; on the other hand, I grow the lettuces
for us, not him, so I wandered over and gave him a telling-off. He just looked up at me quizzically and went
on eating, so I gently shooed him away and covered the lettuces with some wire
netting. He took the hint and settled
down to enjoy the sunshine on the adjacent path. Not so very bothersome, in the end. Later he came up to stand outside the
greenhouse, where he likes to preen; I hope he doesn’t take it into his head to
go inside.
Meanwhile I got down to the task of taming the winter honeysuckle
(Lonicera purpusii). It’s a lovely bush
in winter and early spring, but once the fabulously scented flowers have faded
I tend to ignore it, and as a result it has got much too big and sprawling, with
lots of dead or sparsely foliated branches.
It could take a lot of cutting back and, in case it succumbs to the
treatment, I have a layering from it, nicely potted up, that could be planted
in its place. The pigeons like eating it
too, which doesn’t bother me much – it leafs up very early, and I’ve always
assumed that they like the leaves, but on close inspection I see that it also
produces oddly-shaped orange/red berries (rather like the summer honeysuckles),
and they may be looking for those.
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| Winter honeysuckle berries |
While I was hacking away, I noticed something feathered deep
in the undergrowth behind the bush. The
cover there is quite dense, ideal for nests and baby birds waiting to be fed,
and my first thought was that it was a little blackbird, or perhaps a song
thrush (we’ve had at least one song thrush fledgling being fed in that part of
the garden this year). Then I noticed a
couple of flies on the feathers. Flies
avoid live birds – they might get eaten – so this was a sign that whatever it
was, was dead. A female blackbird? No – it was too big. MUCH too big.
Brown, with a small patch of white feathers – surely not a sparrowhawk? A foray into the bushes from the other side
of the shrubbery revealed that it was indeed a female, or perhaps a one-year-old,
sparrowhawk – striped tail spread out. Sparrowhawks
will fly into deep cover in the hope of flushing out prey, and we presume that
this one misjudged its flight and either crashed into a branch or perhaps broke
its wing and was unable to fly. It hadn’t
been dead long.
I’ve mused in this blog in the past about the difficulty of
burying pigeons in our shallow soil, especially given the need to put them somewhere
where they won’t be inadvertently dug up; and a female sparrowhawk is decidedly
larger than a pigeon. After some thought
I decided to put it in the long bed in front of the veg patch; I’ve tried no-dig
here, but there are weeds there that have needed digging out so I’m less
concerned about disturbing the soil in that bed. I was able to dig a hole wide and deep enough
to accommodate the body, and have marked it so that I don’t disturb it (so no potatoes
or roots! I’m thinking that it’s a good
place, partly shaded by the apple tree, to plant lettuces on top). I’m fairly used to dealing with occasional
remains of a sparrowhawk kill in the garden, but I’ve never had to deal with
the actual sparrowhawk before. And I hope I don't have to again!
