Diary: Birdbrains

[Content warning: profanity, feathers]

Dear Diary,

Those fucking starlings are back. 

Hardly surprising given they’ve been nesting in the eaves every year for the past decade, but enough is enough. If they’re going to throw wild all-night parties, they’ll have to go.

I don’t mind a bit of wildlife myself, but breakdancing at three in the morning is just taking the piss.

I thought we’d reached an understanding. I’d let them dwell in my eaves for the season, and they’d stop bombing my clothes line. 

It seemed to be working just fine with hardly any ruined washing this year - only the occasional accident. Not like previous years when the back yard was an explosion of black and white splatter. A Jackson Pollock hellscape.

The improvement may also have something to do with my neighbours giving up their many bird feeders. They must have gone through tons of seeds, nuts, and lard balls. Every day, for years, their garden looked like a scene from The Birds. You could set your watch by the postman’s Tippi Hedren squeals.

And then came the strange weeds. Who knows what they were feeding the birds, but none of it seemed indigenous to the northern hemisphere, and clearly a lot of it went undigested with the inevitable deposits sprouting everywhere. There are parts of my garden that succumbed entirely to the alien invasion and are now sealed off by government scientists.

But it’s not just the starlings. My house is in the countryside adjacent to woodland, where the crows live. Lots of crows. So many, in fact, that the sky turns black every evening at dusk as they burst, en masse, up and out of the beech trees, screeching bloody murder and freaking everyone out just as darkness descends. 

Mind you, I wouldn’t mess with the crows. They’re smart and very sure of themselves. I’ve seen teams of them attack and chase opportunistic buzzards miles out of town. Should a dog come running, they will fly off, nonchalantly, but not too far. They could probably take the dog, so it’s more a professional courtesy.

Another neighbour had chickens for a while, until the fox had them. My dog tried to warn them when they pecked their way over to our property. He even demonstrated what the fox might do to them by crawling under the hedge and removing some of their arse feathers, but to no avail. It seems they were too into strutting and preening to worry about being someone’s next meal. Obliviousness to oblivion.

There are lots of other birds, of course. Most manage to go about their day without anti-social behaviour, chicken-brained self-absorption, or crowing dark menace. A chaotic avian coexistence.

However, there are also the entitled magpie blackshirts with delusions of supremacy, whose fragile egos are built upon the terrorising and expelling of the smaller birds. Magpies are garden arseholes.

And then there’s the robin. Just the one usually, more curious than cautious, and always so confident and friendly. Venturing ever closer as if they want to communicate, or maybe ask me something, like:

“Did you know the starlings have a nightclub in your eaves?”

Diary