I’ve blogged a few times about the birds that visit my garden and mentioned the family of blackbirds who have chosen to nest in my bay tree.
Between them my little feathered friends afford me many hours of pleasure, but yesterday gave me a new high.
The blackbirds have become frighteningly friendly; frighteningly because not everyone is as welcoming to garden visitors as me.
So anyway, there I was sitting in the afternoon sunshine talking to the cock blackbird and watching said bird going through its usual routine rooting about for grubs and the like when it decided to play hide-and-seek with me.
I’ve been doing a little pond maintenance recently and have removed a couple of aquatic plant pots. Being a lazy bugger I’d left them underneath one of my Japanese Acers and there was this dumb bird standing in one of them.
It bobbed up and down, completely disappearing behind the rim of the pot before standing tall like a jack-in-the-box; well this was just too good to miss...
Munzly
When I was about 14 we lived in a house with a well wooded garden, filled with birds. Over several generations, the blackbirds had come to trust us and, so long as you made no sudden moves, would wander around between your legs like chickens.
Eventually, they were so tame the mother black birds would bring their offspring to where you were sitting in the garden and park them there as if in a creche. You could even feed the babies, who took their confidence from their mother's actions.
The one day, it was too sweltering hot to sit in the garden and I was sitting on the sofa in the lounge with the french doors open reading a book, when I was suddenly pecked on the big toe (no shoes) by the mother black bird and looked down to find she had lined up three fat balls of baby feathers in the middle of the room and was just making sure I realised my responsibilities, before going off to the blackbird equivalent of bingo or whatever she preferred to looking after her chicks.
Like the photo, takes me back there