Badgerstoke on Wildlife

Badgerstoke on Wildlife

At this time of year you should feed the wildlife in your garden. Mrs Badgerstoke is a great lover of wild birds (well the pretty ones anyway, she doesn’t like pigeons) and always makes sure she puts out food for them. Her friend Madge from the cake shop will save any stale produce and she gives half of this to my wife for our garden birds.

My wife puts out food in the garden every morning and I have noticed recently that if I go outside before she has done this there are lots of birds watching me for various vantage points. This is like a scene from a Hitchcock film I saw once; it was about birds but I can’t remember the title.

My wife also used to hang up containers of nuts for the more agile birds like the blue tit or green heron. However she found that these attracted a squirrel. Now I’m alright with squirrels but Mrs Badgerstoke doesn’t like them. She say that the way the constantly twitch their tails reminds her of her Great Aunt Sarah.

I never met my wife’s Great Aunt but she tells me that Great Aunt Sarah had a facial twitch which used to happen at the end of each sentence and some times in the middle of a sentence as well if the subject matter was exciting enough. Apparently she attributed this nervous twitch to the fact that she’s once been stranded for several hours during the London Blitz in an air raid shelter, in total darkness, with twenty American Airmen.

I have noticed that some of the birds in our garden are becoming quite fat and the pigeons in particular have a little trouble taking off at times. Under normal circumstances this might have been a problem for them but my wife has also taken to feeding the stay cat that frequents our garden and that has also has become a little overweight and has no chance of catching even the most obese pigeon.

I did buy my wife a book on identifying garden birds for Christmas a few years ago and she kept a log for a while on all the birds she saw in the garden. However when I caught sight of the entries once I told her that I was a little doubtful that she’d actually seen a puffin as they tended to live on sea cliffs and we were fifty miles from the sea and our garden is quite flat (the only part that might come close to being a sea cliff is a small rockery). She did admit that it may have been a crow but that she’d already recorded one of those and so she though a puffin would be nicer.

Badgerstoke’s Tip:  Even Garden Birds will turn their nose up at Marmite.