Glorious gardens timeless

Three cheers – my lockdown locks are shorn, gone at last. It had seemed like a lifetime since I sat in a barber’s chair. I didn’t look quite such a shaggy dog as some of my chums, but what a feeling of renewal to see the tresses fall to the floor.

While we’ve been isolating at home these last months, sitting out in the garden in the good weather, the birds have got quite accustomed to us, and Inka, too, regarding us as harmless features of the landscape. Blackbirds and song thrushes usually have at least two broods each year and all day they drop into the garden to hunt round our feet for worms to feed their chicks.

From the continued activity we can see from the bedroom window, the sparrows have hatched a third brood in at least one of the nesting boxes. I watched a harassed grey wagtail relentlessly pursued by two of its fledglings jostling with each other to be first in the queue for food, fluttering their wings to stimulate the parent bird to feed them. It will be like that from dawn to dusk until the parent birds tire of it all and kick the fledglings out to fend for themselves

I don’t put out bird feeders at this time of year because there’s plenty of natural food in the countryside. Birds are opportunistic feeders and will flock to the feeders for easy meals for their demanding young. But chicks need the protein that they get from earthworms and insects and other wriggly things in order to develop.

Floral conundrum