The forecast is for 36 degrees in this part of England today. If you’re reading this from another part of the world, be assured that that is HOT for us! I decided to get up early and go running before the heat of the day really got started, but when I opened the door, I found the doorstep already occupied by a peacock butterfly, opening and shutting its wings in a slow blink of warning that said, This is my spot and it’s hot. Yeeeesssssss!
I stepped over it very carefully, but it fluttered at my face and then landed on my tummy like a gorgeous belt buckle. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to spend long on its prime basking spot, it settled back on the doorstep.
It only seems to have taken a couple of days of intense sun to turn the green playing field into straw. A few jackdaws were standing about, panting with their beaks open. Surely they’re intelligent enough to seek shade? Perhaps there’s no food there. I wanted to tell them there’s a bowl of water in my garden.
I kept finding magpie feathers on the edges of the field, as if a bird had been delicately undressing, casting off primary feathers like opera gloves. I did the minimum number of laps as it was already starting to get uncomfortable, waving hello to one of the dog-walkers I normally see much later. Got back to a baking driveway – the butterfly having become fully charged had left its hot spot – and the neighbour’s cat was, as usual, sitting on her drive, watching my return with the inscrutability of an indulgent deity.
On my way to the shower, I got distracted by the bird feeder. At the moment, it’s absolutely teeming with little baby blue and great tits – all shockingly unsupervised by any adults, and behaving just as chaotically as you might expect. In the last couple of days, we’ve also been visited by a couple of baby coal tits trying to blend in with the swarms of blueys. Their parents have probably told them to adopt the usual coal tit modus operandi of swooping in, grabbing a morsel of food, then darting off to a safe place to eat or cache it, but mmmmmm the fat balls are tasty and they can’t quite bear to stop at one nibble. They look a bit like young great tits, till you see them together and realise that they are half the size. All these baby tits have a yellowy cast to them, like a 1970s colour photo. Although they manage very well at the important and intense task of Getting Those Nuts Eaten, they still haven’t mastered the art of danglebird agility just yet, and are inclined to land on each other, the slippy bits of the feeder structure, or the strange metal bird that was supplied as part of it. Sometimes they fly in and hover while they try to work out where to park, before trying out impossibly slender twigs, sloping bits of roof and their siblings’ heads.
Yesterday morning I was woken twice by baby great tits coming into the bedroom! Marks on the windowsill and much tapping at all hours suggest that the house is quite interesting to the birds, and in the heat, I’ve had one side of the three window panels wide open. A baby great tit managed to get in, then tried to get out through the closed panel at the other side. My movement towards the handle encouraged it to flutter in the right direction. Half an hour later, more whirring and donking told me a little bird was trying to get out. This one was totally fixated on the centre panel (which doesn’t open) and when I lifted the blind to open the other side, it squeaked in terror. Poor little thing was so frightened, I felt quite upset. I must have seemed like a monster to it, no matter how softly I spoke and how slowly I moved. Today, I’m looking at baby great tits on the feeder, and wondering if they’re the one whose frantic wing-breath I felt on my arm, whose panicking little face was only inches from mine…and who wrecked my dried flowers.
Words, words, words 