I've got a feeder for you to perch on...
I like birds, although I'm not so sure that they're very fond of me at the moment. We were driving home from a visit to my parents on Saturday when I contrived to run over a blackbird. It happened when I was just tootling along, minding my own business and obeying the speed limit on the way to the motorway junction. I saw a pair of blackbirds out of the corner of my eye on the side of the road, heard that distinctive alarm call and had just enough time to see the male bird launch itself into the air and in front of the car.
This has happened before, but usually you look in your rearview mirror to see the bird wheeling away into the air without a care in the world. This time I glanced back and saw a cloud of feathers and a lump in the middle of the road.
Ooops.
I know it's ridiculous, but as I drove on, I couldn't help but anthropomorphise the situation and imagined the female of the pair standing on the side of the road looking folornly at the body of her soulmate, wondering how she was going to feed all of those hungry mouths in the nest now.
We've got some blackbirds living near us, and they're frequent and welcome visitors in our garden and in the surrounding trees-- although perhaps a bit less frequent since we got the cat, mind. One often sits in the tree outside our bedroom window, and maybe it's my imagination, but he seems to be looking at me somewhat accusingly at the moment; my guilt confirmed when I fail to return his gaze and won't look him in the eye.
Labels: stuff, the natural world
posted by swisslet @ 08:26
3 Comments:
At 2:14 pm,
LB said…
Just to say that (off the top of my head) you have recently posted about beards, hats, birds (twice) and passion fruit.
how old are you, again? Have you started cutting things out of newspapers to show people? Reading the catalogues that fall out of the Sunday papers and thinking "ooh, that looks useful...!"?
At 7:00 pm,
swisslet said…
you're right! I'd better get straight onto another alphabeticon then...
At 10:30 pm,
Cat said…
My mum has an apple tree in her garden in which blackbirds nest every year. I always loved watching them learn to fly, but quite a few of them fell victim to the dog's stalking skills.
He wasn't interested in them when their wee hearts gave out (generally they were too little to fly far) and used to howl and howl once they stopped moving. I think he thought they were quite brilliant squeaky toys.
Poor birds. And poor dog, because once the vet told us it was "simply nature", his free rein to wander the - huge - garden at all times was reined sharply in during springtime. Mind you, he found himself on the sharp end of an unfriendly hedgehog more than once himself.
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