TheBirds
The Birds
We’ve got a bit of a menagerie here. 3 Dogs, 28 Ducks, 6 Geese, 5 Chickens, lots of goldfish and lots of bees. Oh, and assorted wild birds I am nourishing.
I read once that sparrows are on decline in the UK. That’s because they are all here. A million of them have set up Sparrowville in the willow trees and bushes around the goose-pond.
I put out 9 fat balls at the weekend and within 2 days the little vultures had elbowed the blue-tits and the robin out of the way and scoffed the lot. I counted 14 on the bird table yesterday pushing and shoving each other and squabbling and fighting and making one hell of a noise. Whole families have taken up residence in the roof of Dave’s workshop where they twitter and shriek encouragement to him the instant he lights the wood stove.
Blackbirds, blue-tits and the robin adore suet and the dried worms I buy for them.
Dave said “Oooh suet. MMMMM dumplings” .
“It’s for the birds”. I said, but he looked so disappointed that my conscience made me save enough to put in the stew later.
We’ve got a bit of a menagerie here. 3 Dogs, 28 Ducks, 6 Geese, 5 Chickens, lots of goldfish and lots of bees. Oh, and assorted wild birds I am nourishing.
I read once that sparrows are on decline in the UK. That’s because they are all here. A million of them have set up Sparrowville in the willow trees and bushes around the goose-pond.
I put out 9 fat balls at the weekend and within 2 days the little vultures had elbowed the blue-tits and the robin out of the way and scoffed the lot. I counted 14 on the bird table yesterday pushing and shoving each other and squabbling and fighting and making one hell of a noise. Whole families have taken up residence in the roof of Dave’s workshop where they twitter and shriek encouragement to him the instant he lights the wood stove.
Blackbirds, blue-tits and the robin adore suet and the dried worms I buy for them.
Dave said “Oooh suet. MMMMM dumplings” .
“It’s for the birds”. I said, but he looked so disappointed that my conscience made me save enough to put in the stew later.
We get swallows every year around May and they have been coming here for 11 years. The first year they arrived they built nests in the garage so we left the up-and-over doors open just enough so they could fly in and out. Took us a couple of years to decide this wasn’t very secure so Dave got the angle-grinder out and cut a hole in the door. This worked fine. Didn't look very pretty but neither we nor the swallows cared.
Dave converted the garages into his workshop and had to insulate the roof and put on new doors. I panicked. What if they didn't come back? What if they’re too scared by the changes?
I love the swallows. If they are here then everything seems right in my world. I love their calmness, their courage and endurance. If they can fly all the way from Africa to get here then they deserve a place to stay. Least I can do. So from the beginning of May I kept the garage windows at the back of the house open all the time in the hopes they would find somewhere to nest. Did I say I was sane?
They weren't very happy with their new quarters at first, but grudgingly built nests on the fluorescent lights and chittered at me grumpily for days. It meant we couldn't switch the garage lights on at night for the whole of summer but what the heck. They raised two lots of babies each. Four arrived and eleven left and I am very proud of that.
Dave converted the garages into his workshop and had to insulate the roof and put on new doors. I panicked. What if they didn't come back? What if they’re too scared by the changes?
I love the swallows. If they are here then everything seems right in my world. I love their calmness, their courage and endurance. If they can fly all the way from Africa to get here then they deserve a place to stay. Least I can do. So from the beginning of May I kept the garage windows at the back of the house open all the time in the hopes they would find somewhere to nest. Did I say I was sane?
They weren't very happy with their new quarters at first, but grudgingly built nests on the fluorescent lights and chittered at me grumpily for days. It meant we couldn't switch the garage lights on at night for the whole of summer but what the heck. They raised two lots of babies each. Four arrived and eleven left and I am very proud of that.
We had a pair of Blackbirds in the tool-shed last year and as soon as one lot of fledglings had flown the nest Madame laid more eggs and screeched defiance each time Dave went in to retrieve the spades to dig over the veg garden. By the end of summer we had nine pairs of blackbirds in the garden.
All the birds love the peanut feeder which I had to put quite high up as the cockerel learned to leap, flap wings like mad and peck. He prowls underneath all the feeders now calling his wives over to pick up the scraps.
We’ve had hens since we got here and they leave their eggs in the bushes, or anywhere the dogs can find and eat them. Our first cockerel died in the night not long after we arrived, I found him one morning on top of his chicken house looking like he’d stopped in mid-crow and then fallen over.
So I bought a white cockerel from Arras market. He got very nasty, used to peck my boots and scratch at my legs with his claws. The last straw was when I was bending down to clean out their feeder and he flew at my face and gashed my cheek. Pie was his finest hour.
Our neighbour Roger had a spare cockerel, one that had escaped the axe as he was too fast for Roger who was 78 at the time. Dave said it took ages to catch him - the bird KNEW he was destined for dinner. He arrived in a cardboard box, wings clamped over his eyes saying
“OK. Just make it quick will you”.
Due to his stoical, rather dim nature, we named him Wiley after my favourite cartoon character of all time.
We did try guinea fowl. Oh I have never come across a bird as stupid as those six. They had a lovely little house and none of them could remember where it was. None of them could remember where the food or water was. None of them could remember that I was not their enemy and would run full tilt round in circles making an unbelievably loud and horrible screeching noise like someone opening and closing a gate with a very rusty hinge over and over again.
Hens take a just few days to acclimatise, I was still rounding these up six weeks after we got them. It was quite a relief when something ate them. No idea what. They were just running hysterically round the garden one day, making their usual appalling racket, then I saw that one was gone, then the next day another, until we had none.
So I bought a white cockerel from Arras market. He got very nasty, used to peck my boots and scratch at my legs with his claws. The last straw was when I was bending down to clean out their feeder and he flew at my face and gashed my cheek. Pie was his finest hour.
Our neighbour Roger had a spare cockerel, one that had escaped the axe as he was too fast for Roger who was 78 at the time. Dave said it took ages to catch him - the bird KNEW he was destined for dinner. He arrived in a cardboard box, wings clamped over his eyes saying
“OK. Just make it quick will you”.
Due to his stoical, rather dim nature, we named him Wiley after my favourite cartoon character of all time.
You have to introduce a new cockerel very slowly, over a week or two, as hens despise all males and will sneer at them and call them names, causing them to hang their heads in shame and slink about the place in clouds of gloom and depression. He waited out his two weeks in a small pen where they could all see each other but the girls couldn't demoralise him. We introduced him with no problems but the hens still laughed at him behind his back. But he loved
his girls. He'd call them over when he found a particularly nice bit of food. He'd scratch up grubs for them or he’d carry scraps of lettuce in his beak for them.
The saddest thing I ever saw was when all the hens escaped through a hole in the fence into the veg garden and refused to tell him where the hole was. He, poor lamb, stood on the other side of the fence with couple of fat worms in his beak as a present for them calling to them pathetically, if a little muffledly, and all the girls were laughing and cackling and pointing and pulling faces at him.We did try guinea fowl. Oh I have never come across a bird as stupid as those six. They had a lovely little house and none of them could remember where it was. None of them could remember where the food or water was. None of them could remember that I was not their enemy and would run full tilt round in circles making an unbelievably loud and horrible screeching noise like someone opening and closing a gate with a very rusty hinge over and over again.
Hens take a just few days to acclimatise, I was still rounding these up six weeks after we got them. It was quite a relief when something ate them. No idea what. They were just running hysterically round the garden one day, making their usual appalling racket, then I saw that one was gone, then the next day another, until we had none.
The geese started out as supposedly one male and two female goslings from the local market. It took us a year to realise they were all males. When two of them had succumbed to Christmas dinners we called the remaining one Lonely Goose and due to his calm nature gave him a reprieve. Then friend Roger stepped in with a present of three grey geese that someone had given to him because they didn't want them, so lonely goose became known as “White Goose”. This eventually led to enormous confusion when we ended up with loads of goslings most of which grew up to be white geese. But I always knew which one he was. We became quite friendly he and I - he was a little stand-offish perhaps but we knew we meant each other no harm. He liked to stand guard outside the goose house when his girls were sitting to keep them safe. I found him one cold winters night sitting on the ground, head under his wing and I picked him up and put him into his nice warm house, but he was dead the next morning. I was inconsolable. For weeks, each day when I went out to feed the ducks I would say “Hello White Goose”, like I had done every morning for the last ten years, and cry.
We still have the original male grey goose that Roger gave to us. To the delight of family he has been “Big Knob” since he arrived. Now look. He is a grey goose with a big black beak and where his head joins the beak is a large protuberance, in fact a “big knob”. See. Nothing to do with his sexual prowess. He now only has one wife who is a descendant of his original two wives Marge and Delphine. Within three months of owning Big Knob and his wives we found out why the previous owners didn't want them. From late January until the end of March, he turns into the goose from hell. Never have I heard a goose scream like that. Morning until night and through the night too if he feels like it. Spring days our house are punctuated by one of us flinging open the door and shouting “SHUUUUUUT UUUUUUUUP”. This usually stops him for ten minutes. Putting him in his house at night muffles it slightly but it is a very piercing, persistent shriek. We have four other geese who are mostly dull but we do get an enormous amount of eggs from February through to the end of March or mid-April. I freeze them and make lemon curd with them and cakes - oh they make amazing cakes!
Daphne Duck, (Warner brothers cartoons are the best), arrived one year when Dave came back from the market with five ducklings They turned out to be a green-headed male and his brown wife, a white drake and his white wife and one other white duck who looked a bit weird.
The normal looking ones were boring as hell and quacked incessantly. Especially the brown one who would go into a sort of a “quack loop” and run round the trees seemingly unable to stop. Seeing her taking a bath in a bucket was very funny though.
The odd one out I rather liked. She was very clever and would bang on the kitchen door for scraps. Daphne didn’t make a sound except for a the occasional gentle whistle and she hated water. If I left the kitchen door open she was in and would eat the dog’s food and have invisible washes in their water bowl. A fact which mortified them because they know they’re not allowed to eat birds.Over the years, the other ducks died and Daphne became a pet and still didn't quack.
Five years ago a duck that looked exactly like Daphne flew into our garden and she went mad. They stood facing each other and started bobbing their heads frantically at each other.
Finally after all these years she had someone she could communicate with. He had escaped from a farm up the road where they breed them for the market and I did try to get him to stay, (finders keepers and all that), but he flew back to meet his doom. Google told me that Daphne was a Muscovy. So-called not because they originated in Russia as I thought, but because they eat mosquitos. Frankly they eat anything. Between the ducks and the Jack Russels there is not a bug, a slug, or a small mammal left alive here.
So I bought her a mate. Big-Daddy-Po-Po was named by the grandchildren and is a great big bruiser of a bird. When he flies it is quite low. There is a lot of him to get off the ground and you can almost hear the low hum of a straining engine. When he is in flight, you mustn't stand in front of him because he has all of the stopping power and damage potential of a Sherman tank on ice. It was a very successful partnership except we now have 28 muscovies because the wretched things keep hiding in the dense hedgerows in spring, finally emerging with anything up to 16 ducklings.
They fly over the house, circling like a flock of overweight, unsteady vultures. They sit on the roof and they crap on the patio. They sit on the sunbeds and crap on the patio. If we didn't eat the males and the eggs we would be knee-deep in guano, presiding over a barren, mud-filled landscape.
Did I mention the mud? Well, they dig holes to get beaks full of soil and mud to filter out anything edible. Then they spit what’s left out into their water troughs. Clean and refill them with clear water and within an hour they are filled with a smelly black soup because they also bath and leave copious amounts of poop in them.
And they eat, oh man do they eat. Despite having kilos of grain every day, every plant that pokes its nose above the earth is tasted to death by a muscovy duck. They investigate and uproot anything inedible and eat the rest. One year they ate all the kale and so the next time we covered it in frost fleece to keep them off. They used this to make comfy hammocks so they could lie in bed and snack at the same time.
Did I mention the mud? Well, they dig holes to get beaks full of soil and mud to filter out anything edible. Then they spit what’s left out into their water troughs. Clean and refill them with clear water and within an hour they are filled with a smelly black soup because they also bath and leave copious amounts of poop in them.
And they eat, oh man do they eat. Despite having kilos of grain every day, every plant that pokes its nose above the earth is tasted to death by a muscovy duck. They investigate and uproot anything inedible and eat the rest. One year they ate all the kale and so the next time we covered it in frost fleece to keep them off. They used this to make comfy hammocks so they could lie in bed and snack at the same time.
A friend gave us a goldfish, (a very distinctively marked fish), to put in our pond because it had grown too big for their child’s bowl.
We realised that ducks eat fish at about the same time I saw a very distinctively marked fish sliding down one of their gullets.
“Daaaaaavey. They just ate Nemo”. I yelled.
Dave made a big wooden frame and covered it in netting to lay over the top of the pond.The muscovies had several head-bobbing sessions about this and finally decided that if they stood in the centre of the netting it eventually dipped down into the water so they could have a nice bath and fill the fish pond up with poo. Still at least the fish are safe.
They are mostly all black with white heads, like Big Daddy but we get white ones like Daphne from time to time. With our usual literal style of naming we have “Daphne”, “Not-Daphne”, “NotNot-Daphne” and currently “BUT-WE-HAVENT-GOT-4-WHITE-ONES”.
We realised that ducks eat fish at about the same time I saw a very distinctively marked fish sliding down one of their gullets.
“Daaaaaavey. They just ate Nemo”. I yelled.
Dave made a big wooden frame and covered it in netting to lay over the top of the pond.The muscovies had several head-bobbing sessions about this and finally decided that if they stood in the centre of the netting it eventually dipped down into the water so they could have a nice bath and fill the fish pond up with poo. Still at least the fish are safe.
They are mostly all black with white heads, like Big Daddy but we get white ones like Daphne from time to time. With our usual literal style of naming we have “Daphne”, “Not-Daphne”, “NotNot-Daphne” and currently “BUT-WE-HAVENT-GOT-4-WHITE-ONES”.
We gather them up and clip their wings every year and get a little peace but every September they regrow their feathers and off we go again.