A couple of months ago, I was throwing a ball for Daisy on the patio and the ball accidentally hit the orange tree and a cloud of little birds came out of it. I’m not sure how many there were, but an amazing amount.
Now it is staying light later and we are sitting outside in the evening, we can see the birds as they come home and dive into the tree. Some confidently fly straight in while others fly on the barn roof and then fly in. Some miss first time and perch on top of the arches before doing it again. It’s quite funny watching them.
When they have all arrived the tree shimmers with birds settling down for the night.
When they are all in the cheeping starts. I imagine they are all doing a run through of their day and perhaps a Walton’s style ‘goodnight JohnBoy’ at the end.
Of course, we have less cats now, with only Babbity Bumble being able to see. And we don’t have Rosie who would have spent days just pointing at the tree to let us know there were birds in there – but even so, the birds obviously don’t feel very threatened. I had bought them some fat balls as a treat, but they’ve ignored them so far. It’s harvest time, so there’s plenty of food out there for them at the moment, but they do seem to be steadfastly ignoring what I bought them!
We also have pigeons wandering round the patio – and even drinking from the dog’s water bowl. The dogs (except Pixie) do ignore them – which I hope is a sign that we’ve taught them that birds (Ludvig) are part of their family.
I think the pigeons may be responsible for our fig tree debacle too. A couple of weeks ago, Ian noticed we had a really healthy selection of figs on one of our trees and was planning to make a fig and blue cheese tart with them. Two days later, he went out to harvest the figs – and they’d gone! There was not a single one left. The moral of the story being to get to the figs before the birds do.
We were talking to someone who has 5000 fig trees – you’d definitely want to get to those figs before the birds!