leaving home...
The garden is heaving with birds at the moment, fortunately the cat that lives upstairs is capable only of staring, and limits herself to catching frogs which she slowly flattens.The various nests that dot the garden are beginning to eject their broods; outside my bedroom window there's a wrens which has appeared every year for the last five or so. I haven't seen the chicks yet, but there's been a lot of squeaking. I was most pleased to see the family of long tailed tits, I counted nine new chicks bouncing noisily and energetically in one of the apple trees. My researches lead me to discover that they can have up to twelve eggs in one brood, which must be hell for a bird the size of a ping-pong ball. I've now seen newly fledged robins, great and blue tits, blackbirds, as well as the now ubiquitous collared doves.
What I have been missing, thus far, is butterflies. I suppose with an energetic bird population this may not be entirely surprising. All we have is the occasional cabbage white, a great survivor, since most cabbage round here comes from Waitrose, and has been sprayed to within an inch of its life. The buddleia is just starting to flower, so hopefully there will be some better news soon. Nobody has any nettles any more, the foodplant of larval red admirals, peacocks and tortoiseshells, round here, if it isn't sculptural, or ornamental, then it's in a skip before you can say knife. I have a four foot high buxus sempervirens whose crime was that having been trained as a pyramid, the tip died off. Into a skip pronto, it is now a natural shaped small bush, and quite happy with it.
The Avril Lavigne experiment (see Parrots v. Skater punk) has been quite successful, at any rate my gooseberries are still there. Although, bewilderingly, one of the dangling CD's was carried off, and I found it on the other side of the garden, I blame the foxes, no taste in music.
posted by Lampy @ 7/13/2005 11:27:00 am
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