By: Helen

Helen — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:32:21 +0000

James – My desk is placed so that I look over my laptop straight out of French doors across a terrace at my pond – a few feet away – and beyond. The past fortnight has been mesmerising – the cast of the continuous avian drama includes first one, then another duo of robin babies, fed by incredibly hard-working parents, one of them with only one eye (who come and sit on my desk when the door is open and demand more oats). An agressive slightly balding blackbird is feeding two fat brown offspring and repeatedly ‘takes on’ all other wistful, hungry-looking members of its own species as well the innumerable squawking starlings that decend on the garden every few hours. The blackbird even strafed a rather lost-looking baby bluetit this morning – yesterday a small gang of them fledged from a nest box on my oak tree, and were given flying lessons from their parents all day in the adjacent birch tree. Today’s excitement so far consists of a gang of young greenfinches wandering around on the ground under my yew tree, studiously trying to work out if they can eat the composted bark ‘floor’, between vigorous bathing bouts on the raft of weed in the pond. And all the while a lone dunnock hops around the terrace hoovering up microscopic somethingorother. As you imply, much time is being wasted, I must get on…soon…

By: JamesA-S

JamesA-S — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:02:31 +0000

Hello Helen. I didn’t realise that you had one of these great procrastination machines as well….

By: Zoë

Zoë — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:35:18 +0000

Love the way you described the chaffinches chatter, perhaps he is after Bill Oddie’s job on Spring Watch?

Comments on: Starlets

By: Helen

By: JamesA-S

By: Zoë