My flawless bird rescuing record almost wiped out by a murder most fowl

If you are going to use quarantine to set yourself up as a sort of latter day Birdman of Alcatraz, then you have to accept that there may be casualties.

I mentioned before how, since The Dog shuffled off, our previously ignored bird tray has become a popular spot with the locals. Well, chirps of my largesse have clearly spread because every day now brings a feeding frenzy of Hitchcockian proportions. We have our regulars – doves and pigeons and magpies, sparrows, robins and blackbirds – now augmented by occasional tourists; thrushes, tits, wagtails and even a couple of swifts. With all that avian traffic and absolutely no heeding of social distance protocols, fights and collisions are inevitable and a significant accident is just waiting to happen.

Waiting to happen until we were literally about to sit down for the Saturday evening bolognese, as it turned out. But first, let me take you back a few fields. In my long and frequently ridiculous life, I have had many brushes with sick and indigent birds. For all that I love nature, I am surprisingly reluctant to let it take its course, so over the years, I have given over many shoe boxes to lost fledglings, injured birds and essentially anything with feathers that looked worried and stayed still long enough for me to pick it up. And in my experience, it rarely ends well. There were the three fledglings from a toppled nest that I picked up in our garden in London and – on the advice of the man I called in the RSPB – gently put in a disposable nappy and hung on the clothes line so their agitated, shrieking parents could reclaim them. Reader, they all died. There was the pigeon with the injured wing that I was attempting to lift off the middle of the road with my jacket when the bus turned the corner. That one, you don’t want to know. There have been countless little warm brown breasts with fluttering hearts, lots of medicine droppers with water and a few grains of sugar pinched into half-open beaks, and then the inevitable sadness of putting the lids on the boxes and putting them in the bin (the black one, though I have considered the brown.)

So anyway, we are about to sit down last Saturday evening when we hear an almighty thud at the patio doors, right behind the dinner table. We all turn, plates in hands, and see a bird fall to the ground and begin to perform what appear to be the most distressing death throes we’ve ever witnessed. His head hangs uselessly on the ground and his body seems to be spinning in an out-of-control trajectory. We stare in horror for a second or two – and then the unfortunate bird is savagely attacked by a magpie, who appears hell bent on eating it while it’s still warm. We bang on the glass and I run out to clear the other birds, but they don’t go far and meanwhile, our little casualty is writhing in an agony that is almost as painful to witness. He’s broken his neck, I declare, because I suddenly have a degree in bird doctoring; I’ll have to put him out of his misery.

Irace up to the hot press and grab a towel, all the while wondering how I’m going to do it. Will I smother him? Drown him? I haven’t the blood lust for a hammer attack, so I’m thinking maybe I’ll just squeeze him to death. I run out and pick up the miserable creature in the towel and bring him back inside. ‘Don’t bring him in!’ they all scream at once. I think The Youngest is crying. So I take him back outside and because I don’t have a plan, I let him out of the towel so I can forensically plot his murder. And that’s when I notice that his head seems to be back under his control. His legs aren’t working very well but he definitely appears calmer and looks more like something you’d consider sketching. So I leave him on the patio, and keep vigil from inside.

After about 15 minutes, the bird wobbles his way behind some planters, where at least he is safe from predators. When we finish eating, I go out to check on the patient and I can’t see him. I take a step closer to the planters and from the ivy above them, a bird flies out and away. I am simultaneously thrilled and horrified at how close I came to murdering a bird for no good reason. This is how serial killers start. If quarantine lasts much longer, God knows how I’ll finish up.