bird watching

The garden birds tend to become elusive in August.  The nesting season over, the pressure to hold territories is largely gone, and many are skulking out of sight while they moult.  This year's babies are bumbling around in a race against time to learn how to be proper birds before starving or being eaten.  With rumpled plumage and lacking their full adult colours they are simultaneously comical and vaguely pathetic.

Somewhere at the bottom of the garden an owl has been calling during the day.  Voice wobbling with adolescent uncertainty, we are sure it must be a youngster, learning how to too-whit, or perhaps to too-woo.  It's difficult to say.

I watched a green woodpecker on the back lawn, my perch at the dining table with its giant floor length window giving a splendid vantage point.  The patch of red on top of its head was faint and ill defined, but whether it was one of this year's fledglings or a moulting adult I don't know enough about woodpeckers to tell.  It was busily plunging its beak to its full length into the ground as it stabbed the lawn in search of insects, a testament to the way the recent rain has softened the ground, and to the fact that woodpeckers have phenomenally strong necks.  How sad to treat one's lawn for grubs, and not be treated to the sight of a woodpecker garnering elevenses.  Give me a woodpecker over an immaculate sward any day.  Except in the depths of winter in the years when they take a fancy to my beehives.

Green woodpeckers are large birds, but still remain alert as they feed.  This one flashed a look around it in between stabs.  They move by hopping on both legs like a wallaby (or a blackbird) rather than walking.  They are fairly wary of man, and when I'm working out in the garden I only see them flying past, not like the blackbirds and tits that will get on with their own business as long as I don't go too close.  The robins, of course, track a gardener's every move on the lookout for any freshly uncovered things to eat.

The house martins were swooping over the neighbour's field yesterday, scooping up insects.  They sometimes fly over our garden, and I enjoy watching them and hearing their chatter, but they never nest on our house, to my regret.  Never have in over twenty years, though they return faithfully every year to the pair of cottages down the lane.  How long before they disappear back to Africa?  Noticing when you last saw something is tricky, unlike the first sighting of the season. You don't know that a given sighting is the last, so it's a case of gradually realising that you haven't seen it for a while.  Come to think of it, I haven't seen Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat for days.