Bird bothers - and the body in the bushes

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.

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. 

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!