18^th June 2014.

I was woken this morning by the din of rooks. Last year they lived in the willow tree at the end of the road. During the winter they moved to the sycamore tree in our next door neighbour’s garden. I enjoyed the striking image of black scruffy shapes against bare branches and twigs. Now they have moved to the trees at the bottom of our garden. They are the noisiest birds imaginable and they drown out the melodious dawn chorus we have been used to.

The old collective noun for rooks is a “Parliament.”  It is perfect. They create a cacophony of sound, a harsher more abrasive version of prime minister’s question time.  They are probably trading insults and trying to outshout each other. There seems to be no semblance of discussion, only a constant squawking which could be the rook version of “Hear! Hear!”  nor is there any evidence of a Speaker rook calling them to order.  

Meanwhile it is costing us a fortune in corn for the chickens, and seeds and suet pellets for the other garden birds. The rooks have worked out they have a good billet here tucking in to all this food we provide.

I was worry they would attack our other  bird visitors, or at least their eggs or chicks, so I look it up on line. There seems to be no evidence that they do attack, although they eat road-kill and have pretty eclectic food tastes. Of course- once I start searching there is no end of fascinating information to distract me from what I should be doing.

The British Garden Birds website tells me “Rooks are rarely alone and so their raucous caws can become overwhelming.”  That’s another thing about the internet, you can always find out things you already know. I did know they are intelligent birds, but it seems that in  laboratories they even learn to fashion tools. The BBC Wildlife website reports that one learned to twist a piece of wire into a hook to fish for a can of food. The website points out that this has not been known in the wild. The scientist, aptly called Mr Bird, speculates why this should be the case. I question why on earth would they need to do this in the wild? On the other hand they may just do it in the privacy of their own homes or in cages they may just do it to entertain their human guards.

The BBC also informs me that they are unpopular with farmers because of their omnivorous diet and “in spite of their reputation for intelligence, they can’t tell the difference between discarded turnips, those the farmer has put out for sheep, and those he wishes to sell.”

I feel guilty but I look up “How to get rid of rooks humanely”. Basically there isn’t a way apart from shotgun fire and that might scare off the other birds which  we have spent the last twenty years courting. When the shooting season starts there will be shoots  across the field at the bottom of the garden. Pheasants seem to come into our garden then as a safe haven, a gun free zone, but it is possible the guns will scare off the rooks.

A few weeks ago we had a village Fayre and there was a scarecrow competition. Perhaps my neighbour still has the one she made so that I could borrow it. I think I will probably have to resign myself to closed windows and ear plugs and look forward to the dawn getting later after Saturday.

6/6/14

Sunshine was forecast and it has arrived. Jeffrey is going to the opticians so I am walking the dogs on my own. I grab a pair of binoculars and Charlie and I go to collect Jazzer. There is little breeze and  I stroll listening to the birds. It’s hardly the dawn chorus, I rarely see dawn, but the forest is still in the sunshine and bird songs float among the trees.

I see movement at the top of a pine tree where I  saw the . The bird  hops about in the branches, doing a good impersonation of a pine cone when I try to focus on it. When I eventually succeed it turns out to be a chaffinch;a disappointment. I sit for a hwile on a piece of tree trunk which the Forestry have left in the middle of a track for no apparent reason. I am hoping to spot woodlarks. I can hear them but no joy in spotting them.

Jazzer and Charlie carry on without me for a while then come back and hassle me when they realise they are unaccompanied, so we carry on through Meg’s track. The wild privet have started to flower and there is a slight fragrance but there aren’t enough blooms yet to produce the heady scent that I love and associate with summer.

I hear a goldcrest where I often hear it. A rook flies overhead. There are not many flowers on the sides of the drove at present. The cow parsley is past its best. There are one or two Bladder Campion reminding me that I have one in a vase waiting  to be  drawn. I have the same guilty feeling about the Ribbed Plantain. They are not the most showy plants with brown, bee like  flowers but the textures are  fascinating.

  I wonder whether we are going to have another mast autumn. Everything is early. The hawthorne are smothered with the pink bloom of berries forming. The beech look strange. They have their mast forming  like  small green teasels along all the outlying branches. There are bunches of sycamore seeds hanging like propellers. They are all far more advanced than you would expect them to be. I haven’t noticed any acorns. I need to look more closely to see what is happening with them.

Why don’t you read the instructions! Jeffrey always says that to me when I complain that things don’t work. So here I am again trying to work out how to do this blog without having worked out the basics. “I’m going to watch a video tutorial,” I told him as he left for his singing lesson. I have an hour an a half before I have to go for my guitar lesson. At least I started to take lessons from the beginning with that rather than trying to teach myself from a book.

I have taught myself so many things from books. My mother tried hard to teach me to crochet. Eventually I taught myself from a book in the Pattern department of Coupes haberdashery shop where I worked as a saturday girl in my teens.The first thing I made was a suit. That’s the problem. I decide I want to do something so I start to do it without learning the basic skills before I begin.

I did start to watch the video tutorials but got bored when they told me stuff I had already done and didn’t tell me the stuff I wanted to know.

“I know a man who can” the advert says. So that’s the answer. I will have to email Arike and ask her to give me a lesson next monday.

That gives me an excuse to get back to my emails. That’s always a good source of distraction for an hour or so. My Blackberry tells me there is a writing competition for non- fiction. I could follow that up. I could also sort out some of the talks I will be doing for Wateraid. School Governor duty is coming to an end so there are less emails about that. The Governors  have been put on the Liverpool Care Pathway without the kindness that should accompany it.

That’s a story for a different day.