On Royal Indisposition and Avian Connections.

I spent three hours today doing some moderately strenuous garden work with very little in the way of the usual deleterious physical consequences. That made a refreshing change.

The same cannot be said of our dear old Queen (or queer old Dean, as Dr Spooner would have it.) Today was the first day of the Jubilee celebrations and she has already pulled out of the memorial service (or whatever it’s called) in her honour because of ‘experiencing some discomfort.’ Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The sort of discomfort commonly experienced by ninety-six-year-olds is not something one generally associates with royalty.

But the big news of today concerns the birds.

Firstly, I’ve noticed over the past couple of days that the blue tits have been bringing food to the nest box but not taking it in. Instead, they appeared to be only showing it to the chicks, which suggested that they were tempting the brood to come out. Today I saw the two parents come to the box without food, take a quick look around the inside, and then fly away. I didn’t see them come back. I think it reasonable to assume, therefore, that the babies are now experiencing their first day in the big, bad world. (And it’s heartening to think that the parents bothered to come back to make sure they hadn’t left any of the kids behind.)

Secondly: remember me mentioning in a post a moth or two ago that a strikingly marked and coloured cock pheasant had appeared in my garden? I hadn’t seen him again until today, but as I was walking up the lawn I saw him approaching me with apparent purpose. And then he began to make a strange sound. Now, the usual form of vocal expression from a cock pheasant is either an ear-piercing shriek when they’re declaring their territory or warning the hens of possible danger, or a mellifluous (and rather irritating) clucking sound when they’re eating. This was different; this was a sort of squeak with a distinctly pleading tone. And the same pleading tone was evident in his eyes as he looked up at me.

I studied him and decided he looked underfed. He was a little smaller and less rotund than the average cock pheasant, and it seemed to me that he would have been quite unable to compete with the bigger males for food, mating rights or anything else. I beckoned him to follow me and he did. I put a handful of bird seed on the lawn, which he devoured quickly before giving me the pleading look again. ‘May I have some more, please?’ was the obvious message, so more was what he got – a substantial amount in a bowl, most of which he ate before wandering off without so much as a ‘thank you.’ And that’s why he has now been christened Oliver after young Master Twist.