The Arms Race in a Chirpy Back Garden
One morning, during Covid lockdown, I must have been punch drunk from the piercing dawn chorus when I decided to do my bit for wildlife. The blue tits. Not the crows and pigeons. And although I am a Toon Army supporter, not the wily magpies either.
But I digress.
To save money, I bought one of the simpler bird feeders, a transparent plastic cylinder with a peg on either side for the tiny birds to land on. On the brick wall by the kitchen it went, loaded with wild bird seed and peanuts. Bucolic bliss to ease the ache of lockdowns, I said to the misses. She looked at me out of alternating tails of her eyes, but said nothing. I pretended not to notice. We are married after all.
The next day I shot to the bedroom window for the pleasing country scene I expected. Ha. Minor disaster. Peanuts gone. Cracked feeder lying on the patio. The stomach skewering aftermath of rodent wrought carnage. In my usual headlong rush into David Attenborough territory (I’ve even got his light sky blue shirt) ) I’d made no allowance for the pesky squirrels. Wife loves the bushy tailed scavengers, but I’ve never been that keen. Said misses grunted, silently squirreling my mishap away for exaggeration and mixing of metaphor before deliciously retweeting to the kids.
Undeterred, I bought a sturdier bird feeder, made of metal with an outer cage to stop the larger birds getting in. As advised, I hung it on a pole at least 3 feet away from tree boughs. Out of reach of squirrels. Ah. thank you sucker, scoffed my scurrying co-tenants as they skimmed up the pole. Within hours they’d pulled the feeder to the ground and when I replaced it they spilled its contents by making it sway from side to side.
A baffle was my revenge. For days, instead of writing, through a first floor window I took wicked delight in watching the quotidian knock and press of their greedy snouts against the transparent umbrella like device. I recorded one episode but lost the reel. Or maybe their patron, the misses deleted it.
Yet the feed went down faster than I expected leaving a black hole in my budget. And I found myself regularly cleaning pigeon mess under the feeder. Reason: the little birds dropped more feed than they ate as they pecked at the food. All the larger birds, the pigeons and crows, had to do was wait for the copious easy pickings to drop, like manna, onto the ground.
To catch the waste I attached a shower cap to the bottom of the cage. But the saved seeds began to germinate and an unpleasant paste formed in the cloth. When I replaced the baggy shower cap with a flat hessian floor, the crows could hover in the air long enough to tug on and unravel the matting, and reach through the bars to the food. So I wrapped a two inch rim of tape up and around the bottom of the bird feeder. Now, even when the feeder swayed with their frantic tugs on this rim to try to reach the din dins, the seeds didn’t spill out.
Problem solved?
Not quite.
One morning, I noticed the crows milling around under the feeder the way traders used to on the floor of the Stock Exchange. The magpies, trust them, had learned to launch vertically, like Harrier jets, to peck a hole in the underside of the feeder to free the food.
I reinforced the bottom of the cage with two layers of tape and hessian.
Now, the blue tits can eat in some safety and peace and I’ve cut down on the waste. I’d apply for a patent but the billions will go straight to my head. Colonize it and I won’t be able to stop.
I’m off to chainsaw my stethoscope. That, without knowing it, I’ve been dying to do for years.
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