Garden Twitter

I'm pleased to say the recent snow hasn't had any obvious affect on the presence of birds in my garden. I've kept them fed and watered and, observing their terrific response to a block of suet embedded with mealworms, I've put up two more.

In the last couple of weeks I've noticed:

• A good dozen sparrows.
• Three or four goldfinches.
• Several pairs of starlings.
• A pair of black caps (who eat only the suet)
• A bigger gang of jackdaws than I'd really like.
• A flock (at times) of wood pigeons.
• An old wood pigeon who spends most of his time dozing on the fence.
• Several collared doves (two of whom I think are nesting in the big conifer).
• A song thrush.
• Lots of blue tits.
• A scuttle of coal tits.
• A constant skirmish of blackbirds.
• An annoyance of magpies.

Rat!

I saw the Giant Rat of Sumatra on Sunday. Well OK, it almost certainly wasn't the Giant Rat of Sumatra, given that although we don't know the outcome of that infamous case, we can usually assume that Mr Holmes effectively sees off his foes and anyway, it would be rather elderly by now.

But it was a big rat.

I spotted it as I was helping myself to some muesli in the kitchen. It was at the bottom of the garden helping itself to the seed I'd just put down for the ever-hungry wood pigeons and collared doves.

At first I wasn't sure it was a rat, because I couldn't see a tail, but using the binoculars in the living room, I could see it well. As I watched, I could see it raise up on its hind legs and sniff the air. I could feel Patsy123 shiver next to me.

It wasn't totally unattractive. Unlike the rats in movies, which are always wet and dirty, this was a very clean specimen, with white fur showing clearly on its underbelly. But it was a big clean specimen and I manfully went out into the garden and sent it one its way. It ran off through Lucy Smooth's garden, so far as I could tell.

With luck it might prove to have been just a passing rat, a traveller by trade. But it does mean I've had to stop putting down seed for a while. The feeders are kept well stocked, but the wood pigeon doesn't like the new regime of having to pick up bits and pieces the sparrows have dropped or thrown away.

Toad

Just as I was leaving the house this evening, I saw a blackbird in the garden. I retrieved the latest gowk from the compost.

Walking up the path that runs by the dene, I met a toad.

Sometimes it's like a jungle out there.

I've always been rather fond of toads. I never quite forgave my mother for making me take back the one I found in Saltwell Park all those years ago. After all, she let me keep the tiddlers, and they all died.

In the gloom, I almost trod on the toad. Only the fact that he might have been a turd saved him. He was looking pretty miserable. You may think it's difficult to tell whether a toad is miserable or not. Trust me, he was miserable.

Maybe it was because his normally rough and leathery skin was slicked with rain, or maybe he was just, you know, having one of those days. A kind of toady brown study.

Sitting there on the path was not in his best interests, and I told him so. I'm not averse to carrying on conversations with animals, providing no-one is looking, so I explained that just where he was sitting, the Future of the Nation normally hang out, drinking lager, smerkin' tabs, scribbling their infantile messages on the fence and generally cussing as much as the sentence will allow.

"They will make short work of you, I can assure you," I warned.

I bent down to pick him up. He hopped a couple of hops towards the hedge. But that seemed to be it. I tapped him with my finger. No more hopping took place.

Since I did actually have shopping to do and it was pissing down, I figured bold moves were called for.

Very carefully, with the edge of my foot, I slid him, and the leaves he was sitting on, under the hedge.

"Thanks, bonny lad," he said, " I couldn't have hopped another inch."

Harvest Fest

The TV told me today that weatherforecasters are predicting a cold and icy winter, with some of it coming along real soon now. This means I may have to throw out my firm belief that trees laden with berries do not constitute a sign of a forthcoming Bad Winter.

Because the trees and bushes round here are certainly heavily laden this year. My pyracantha has never had such a crop of orangeness and the dene at the end of the street is crunchy underfoot with hundreds of acorns. Best of all, next door in Bob Eh's garden, the hawthorn is full of fat little fruit. Fat little fluttery fruit. The best crop of sparrows in years.

I'm getting at least a dozen in the garden every day. I've not had that many for almost ten years. It's getting to the point where I may have to buy another feeder for them.

But still no blackbirds. I was up at Hexham today for a seminar on self-promotion and the trees were full of blackbirds gulping down berries from the rowans. The blackbird I reported here a while ago proved to be a young straggler who's not been seen since.

The gowks continue to go in the compost.

I know, "What's a gowk?"

I miss my blackbirds. I haven't seen one in over a month.

This crazy thing they have where they go off to warmer climes and are replaced by other blackbirds from, um, colder climes does my head in. In particular, the gap between Departures and Arrivals is a painfully long one.

I became aware that they'd gone when the apple gowks I threw out for them every day started to pile up. Eventually they were harbouring so many wasps that I had to just turn them under the soil.

I've really missed the blackbirds' antics. The way they attack everything they eat as if expecting it to fight back. The noisy, excitable cry they have when they're disturbed and fly off into the bushes. The funny run, halt, run across the ground and the turning up of the tail as they settle on a branch.

But this morning I saw a shadow scuttle under the bushes. A distinctive shadow. Sure enough, out into the daylight came a young, or maybe a hen, blackbird..

I saved my first apple gowk tonight.

Dead & Buried

In my efforts to create a more "natural" garden, I've left things to grow as they will; to run wild, in fact, much to the chagrin of Lucy Smooth next door who sees it as her Mediterranean duty to use the land as profitably as possible. My crops of grass and brambles threaten her more carefully tended beans, lettuces, garlic and artichokes, and the Martock Bean Enclosure must look like a sick joke to her.

Alas, the thickening undergrowth has also proven the undoing of one of the less bright avian ground feeders. I discovered the remains of a collared dove under the bushes this morning. I say "remains", but frankly it was virtually intact. Just dead and a bit defeathered. Bloody cats again.

I dug a hole for it next to the garden wall. In the process, I uncovered a very active ant colony which I thought I'd persuaded into non-existence a couple of years ago.

They're now going to have to decide whether the presence of a rather large bird carcass presents insurmountable rebuilding problems, or simply incorporate a considerable food reserve into a remodelled colony.

Oh to be at the council meeting.

Woodpigeon Resurrection?

I'm cautiously optimistic. The garden was visited by a fat woodpigeon today. I realise that one woodpigeon looks much like another, but as he flew off, I'm sure I spotted a raggedness in his tail. Looking under the bush again, the feathers there seem mainly to be tail feathers. I've seen collared doves escape with only the loss of some tail feathers.

Maybe....

To wish him well, whoever he is, here's a poem I wrote at a time when I did such things:

WOODPIGEON

Plump and round, pearly grey,
Circling in,
White flashes on his wings
Signal his approach.
Undercarriage down,
But still a bumpy, heavy landing
Several feet from the grain.
Almost bewildered, looking round,
Why am I here?
Then sees the seed
And waddles to it, slow and indirect.
Staccato pecking,
Neck spots up and down.

(26 May 1995)

And I picked and ate my first raspberry of the year today. Sometimes life's not too bad at all, huh?

Red in Tooth and Claw

I came back saddened from my trip out to feed the birds this morning. Under the bushes I noticed an awful lot of feathers. It may have been a collared dove - I've lost those before - but the size and colour lead me to think that the woodpigeon who comes to hoover up every day has met an untimely death

I wouldn't mind so much if I thought he'd gone to feed a hungry urban fox, or a desperate hedgehog, but I know it'll have been a bloody well-fed domestic cat. They're on the increase round here as new families move in (don't they know the Council Rat Man is on top of the problem?) and much though I like cats, it's becoming quite a task to keep them out of the garden.

Ah well, a radical trim of the lower layers of the bushes is called for, so that the cats can't hide there.

On a lighter note, I found when I entered the Martock Bean Enclosure, that there are signs of new growth in every leaf axil. Fingers crossed, there may yet be beans aplenty to keep the Martocks off the endangered species list.

Martocks aside, I was still a little heavy-hearted when I got back to Stately Zip Mansion. But as always, I found a quick visit here was enough to set me off again with a happy heart.

Green Fingers (didn't mention that on the box ...)

I put the empty milk bottles out last night. They were still there this morning.

I put the wheelie bin out last night. It was still there, unemptied, this morning.

It's a Bank Holiday, right!?

When you work for yourself every day's a holiday. Or a workday. You can pick yer choose. But it does mean that you lose sight of the statutory holidays.

Anyway, once I'd realised it was a holiday, I figured I ought to do something of a traditional Bank Holiday nature. But I don't have a car. So going out on the roads and sitting in traffic jams was out. (I was always puzzled by my parents' need to drive out on a Bank Holiday, long after they'd retired. Some kind of Pavlovian reaction, I suppose.)

For a while I considered painting the front door. It does need it. But after I'd looked at the instructions on the paint tin, I figured my while might mean that it would now take too long to dry. In passing, however, I did note something important in the instructions which I'd not taken into account before.

When empty do not use this pack to store foodstuffs, it says.

Who the hell would want to store their Hobnobs or their bacon sarnies in an old paint tin? Yet I'm well aware that manufacturers only put this sort of cautionary wording on their packs because someone has already done what they now warn you not to do.

I opted for that other holiday pastime, gardening.

I mowed both lawns, back and front. I sprayed spot weedkiller very carefully on the dandelions at the front. I have to be careful, because in essence the front lawn is composed of daisies, some buttercups, a funny little purple flowering thing that came from Lucy Smooth's garden, and, oh, a little bit of grass. Difficult for spot weeder to find the spots in that lot.

I raked out the thatch from the back lawn. Amazing how much thatch you can rake out from a lawn if you let yourself do it every two or three years.

I sowed a little bag of grass seed I found in the garage and watered it with Weed & Feed, taking great care not to water my trainers (Will mark clothes and hard surfaces, it says on the box)

It might not sound like much to a seasoned gardener, but I awarded myself a bronze star. I didn't stick it on my T-shirt, however (May cause staining of some cotton items, it says on the packet).

Most of the evening I spent watching from the window for the woodpigeon who normally comes every night to hoover up the seed I put out for the ground feeders; I was sure he would sense my seeded lawn.

He didn't come. I guess he knew it was a Bank Holiday.

The Birds & the Bugs

I think I've already established my credentials as a man of the birds. Indeed Bob Eh from next door calls me the Bird Man of *Our Street*. I've spent more time this week waving my arms in the window to scare away the bullyboy magpies and jackdaws, so the littl'uns can get their grub, than I have coughing, and that's saying something.

It'll come as no surprise, then, to find me poking around in the RSPB website. And what do I find? An exciting new count they want us to carry out. We have to count bugs! Hurrah! This will show how available this valuable food source is to the feathered folk.

Not just any old bugs, however, but bugs that end up splattered on the number plates of our cars after each journey.

The count lasts from 1 -30 June and there's an online form to record your splatterings. Even better, you can get a downloadable 'Splatometer' - a grid to help you count the insects!!

And I don't drive! I don't have a CAR!

Do you suppose I could just hold a card in front of me and run Very Fast Indeed for a while, then count the splattered insects on my card?

Will and the Beanstalks

I know I've been quiet on the subject of the wildlife on the Zip Estate. Partly this is due to my recognition that any hopes I had for the patter of tiny wings have been dashed. As I said, the collared doves gave up on the Cypress Highrise while I was gallivanting in Duntrune. But now it's clear that the blackbird I saw making frequent inspections of the Pyracantha Bijoux Apartments did not take up his option. At great personal risk I delved in among the spines today but, apart from last year's abandoned nest, there was nothing.

It seems that while this is clearly a very good place to eat, no-one wants to live here. Bugger.

I pulled out the old nest and found that it was being used as a squat by a family of woodlice. Ecch.

But news on the Special Bean front is good. Never one to move too fast, I left them in their plastic carrier bag, where they're thriving. I've had time to read the bumf that came with them from Will Barrow. It seems that, when I finally get them planted out, there's no likelihood of my finding a beanstalk to a giant's castle sprouting in the garden. Which is something of a two-edged sword, in that, while I wouldn't wish to have a giant crashing down from above, a goose that lays golden eggs would not go amiss in these days of straightened circumstances.

But no, these are Martock beans. Apparently (and I paraphrase the bumf from Will's mate Matt) they were for a long time "the traditional broad bean-type thingy" of the area round Bath (Martock being a place near Bath). They became lost because "better" varieties - whatever that means in this context - became more popular, but were rediscovered in their last growing place: the garden of the Bishop of Bath.

The object of the exercise is not to eat all the beans which hopefully will appear on the plants. This is an exercise in conservation, a "spread of custodianship." What I have to do is leave some to dry on the plant, until the pods are crackly dry, then put the beans in an envelope for next year.

Next year, of course, there will be a whole garden full of Martocks and I can stuff myself full as well as garner for posterity. And I can pass them on to other suitable custodians.

Mr Zip, Custodian of Beans. I like the sound of that.