Third
Generation Blue Tits
There is a new generation of birds
flitting around the garden, and it proves a point I once read in a magazine on
birds. When winters are inclement, birds
tend to produce more than one brood.
Usually two but a friend in Sligo who has a keen eye for bird life tells
me sometimes a third brood is not unusual.
Well, we have had two generations of Robin this summer and three of blue
tits; the last crew are still in moult and are tiny.
By comparison to the spring brood,
the Early Autumn gang are just that, gangsterish. One little chap has earned the name Al
Capbeak for the attacks he makes on any other visitor to his particular peanut
feeder. Fat balls are a big issue with
him. These days his stressed and worn
out parents put beak under wing and you can almost hear an avian “Oh dear, why
did I lay that third clutch of eggs?
Today the temperature is allegedly warmer
than it is in France; balmy with a marvellous breeze fluttering the leaves of
the sycamore tree. Wasps gather on the sycamore leaves to indulge in a sugar
binge; they then fly tipsily across the garden and [gleeful smirk here] some
become ensnared in the huge webs along the dry stone walls.
I hate wasps. Hate with a capital H. Their sting knocks me out cold. I carry the needful with me everywhere to
cope with their viciousness. I read,
recently, in Michael Viney’s column in the Saturday Irish Times that wasps are
in short supply this year. Oh dear!
Yipee! Hooray!, Yahoo! Yippee Kiyay! Aw gee shucks! I am soooooo worried, not! Not really. As John Wayne might have said, “The
only good wasp is a dead wasp”.
It’s the bees that worry me.
I have been busy putting out bee
nests for them; Ladybirds are plentiful this year and they are being
accommodated as well. I was a wonderful
summer with the garden filled with lacewings, dragonflies, of every hue,
demoiselles, and grass hoppers chirping of an evening. Warm summer evenings spent sitting out until
dark watching the Pipistrelle bats fly and on one memorable Saturday night in
early August, at Midnight, the lonely cry of the Curlew broke the night’s
stillness.
What my parents termed “Hunter’s Moon” is lighting up the garden these nights;
its light makes a stroll in the garden before bed enchanting. Foxes dance in its light in the garden by the
Spirea, and our hedgehog trundles out across the lawn, intent upon his own
business.
OH and I spent Thursday dismantling
an old shed which was leaning at an angle of 85 degrees. A former calving shed built by my
Grandfather, it was my Uncles pigeon shed in his teen years, and my Father
re-vamped it into a luxury dog house, complete with a mattress off an old divan
bed, old blankets and insulated it with layers of cardboard. There were winter nights in my childhood when
Jeff the collies bed was warmer than mine.
Jeff passed away to the great bone pile in the sky in ’72 and the shed
became a junk hold. Ivy covered it until
everyone forgot there was a shed there, except me, and on Thursday it gave up
its treasures.
One
well rusted BSA bike circa 1960 which still had fully functioning brakes,
the
owner passed away two years ago having forgotten about it.
8
boxes of jam jars
A
box of brown and cream cups
Fourteen
million spiders webs, two robins nests and four doors housing
an
entire continent of woodworm.
Also, in the midst all of this, we found
my old cot. Already twenty years old
when I was born, it still retained its blue paint and a painted pig with
Victorian jacket and hat and handkerchief tied to a stick over his shoulder. Sound as could be and not more than forty
wood worm holes. OH treated them and my
old play pen with something to deal with the wood worm and they now have a new
home up on the walls of the old cow house.
Come the spring and a new glass house
will stand there. Beside it, hopefully,
will be a new flower bed with Foxgloves, Monkshood, Poppies, Lupins, Michaelmas
daisies, Crocosmia and Dahlias. On the
bank above it I hope to have masses of assorted daffodils, waving in the breeze
that permanently enfolds our garden.
