Beginning with B

It started with the chiff chaff. It always starts with the chiff chaff. Followed by the cawing of the jackdaws carrying down the chimney and echoing through the fire place into the front room as they once again set about stuffing twigs, moss and general detritus down the chimney pot for their nest. Last week David heard the reeling song of the grasshopper warbler. A few days ago, as the sun shone strong and warm, I saw my first orange tip and red admiral butterflies. The white and buff tailed bumblebees are so abundant and busy that you have to be alert to the buzzing for fear of a head on collision. A pair of mistle thrush regularly have a noisy chest off with the magpies residing a few trees away, while another pair have set up home hidden in the tangled depths of ivy enveloping one of the ash trees in the corner of the sheep field. Their new neighbours appear to be the wheatears, but a more reliable identification with binoculars is required, instead of an "is it, isn't it" identification through two pairs of squinting, ageing eyes. I know the swallows have returned down the road at Pennant, but so far no sign of them here at Banceithin. I'm watching. I'm waiting. For swallows. For housemartins. For the cuckoo. For a lamb.

Lambing has been the usual waiting game, although this year the twin technologies of scanning and crayon have at least narrowed our watch and wait window to a workable two weeks as opposed to the long drawn out six weeks of lambings past. There is a pronounced path across the field in a diagonal line from the gate by the house to the stile in the corner. To and fro. Checking. Feeding. Watering. Last Friday, Babette did her usual trick of slipping out twins early, unseen and unaided, presenting us with two licked clean lambs at the morning feed. A ram lamb - Bobby. A ewe lamb - Betty. Babette, Bobby & Betty. A lovely family trio. 

 

The ram had clearly been having a good day because within the hour, in the time it took me to go back to the house for a quick breakfast and return to check Babette, Babs popped out a single and immediately set to work cleaning her up. Usually when the umbilical cord breaks as the lamb leaves the ewe, the "tail" left at the lamb's navel is short, about 2 inches or so, or if it's longer the ewe might nibble it shorter. Babs, however, left her new born with a two foot long, dark red, slippery monster of a "tail", as thick as a finger at the navel. Standing for the first time within minutes of birth is miracle enough, so to expect this lamb to do that with an umbilical snake tripping her up at each attempt was too much. Tap, tap, tappity tap on the internet forums ...... carefully tear it away at the correct length was the advice. Yikes! A smallholder is never too experienced to face another new experience! Pinching the cord tightly closed with one hand, David pulled away the rest of the snake. Yuk. That felt instinctively wrong. But a quick spray of iodine, back to mum, and she's up and suckling straight away. A bonnie wee ewe lamb with floppy ears. Bonnie. The miracle of life.

Odd Job, Bodge Job

Dry days have been hard to come by of late, so when Mother Nature deigns to hold off on the wet stuff for a succession of days, it's foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity to tick a few outdoor jobs off the list. Not every job can be a big job, but completing a selection of little jobs in and amongst some general pottering can be just as satisfying.

David's odd jobs tend to involve hammers, nails, a drill and assorted cuts of wood.

First, he built a chicken shelter. Having moved the chicken house away from rattus rattus and having increased the flock from four to eight, there was no longer sufficient space under the house to accommodate all the girls on rainy, sleety, haily, windy days. When free ranging they have access to a myriad of shelters; picnic benches, bushes, vehicles, trailer, wood shed, boiler room (if SOMEONE leaves the door open), but options are limited when they are confined to their run. If you've seen David's pig ark and sheep shed constructions, you'll instantly recognise the inspiration behind the chicken shelter design. David works to a very flexible design, easily scaled up or, in this case, down, depending on your sheltering needs. I'm calling the new chicken shelter the Bunker. Being low to the ground it calls to mind entrances to underground hurricane and air raid shelters.

The Bunker has inspired me to name the last of our new flock yet to be named. Dorothy. Hurricane, twister, over the rainbow, you see where I'm going .....

Back to David's handiwork. Some further rummagings in his wood stocks later, and the rotten boards of the raised veg beds were fixed. More hammering and drilling and the new compost bins rose up from the ground as if by magic. Give him tools and a pile of pallets and he's an odd job genius!

My odd jobs tend to involve paint brushes and procrastination. Whilst David hammered and constructed, all I managed to do was think about getting up a ladder to re-paint the top floor window surround (it was stripped of its expensive face lift by a particularly aggressive, perfectly angled hail storm), decide it was too cold to go that high up, and instead paint the pallets of the de-constructed and re-constructed chessboard ....

Oh yes, and I also painted the outline of some utensils. As you do. Don't ask. Just another crazy idea born of too much time trawling the internet on rainy days.

However, not every job that day was successful. Nest box checking and moving proved surprising tricky for the simplest job on the list.

  

The robin box just would not budge from its nailed in position too high up the tree. Hammer failed, screwdriver failed. Just one more pull was a pull too far. As I watched David fall backwards off the ladder, hammer still in hand, the world slowed down, giving me sufficient time to register the fact that he was falling, consider the outcome should he hit the ground, wonder if I should intervene to try to break his fall, and ultimately do nothing but watch gravity do what it does. Fortunately, things were moving faster in David's world, and so was his brain. As his feet left the ladder he had the good sense to inject a little impetus and so turn his fall into a leap, landing unsteadily but safely, hammer still in hand. We decided that was sufficient drama for one day and went inside for tea and cake.  The robin box remains in its position too high up the tree.

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There's been a murder

I've always defended the magpie, jay and their corvid brethren. Yes, they steal and yes, they munch on the odd baby bird or two, but their plumage is magnificent and as a nation of avid meat-eaters (which very few of us catch and kill ourselves), who are we to pass judgement on the corvid's roll in the avian food chain.

Having said all that, I shall now proceed to pass judgement on certain aspects of their behaviour....

Sharing the premises with a recently fledged family of six magpies and one of four jays is like living next door to a family of juvenile delinquents. First, there's the noise, that clack, clack, clacking laughing call. The one benefit of this racket is that it gives away of the location of the latest act of mischief:

- the woodshed, where they harangued the swallow family on a daily basis right up until the day the four chicks fledged (I've run the length of the top field on more than one occasion trying to get to the shed before the magpies get to the nest);

- the fruit patch, where they compete with the jays to see who can grab the most redcurrants in one snatch through the net (so much so that the weight of all those corvids proved to the the last straw for the rotting wooden post holding up the netting);

- the sheep field, where they take it in turns to hop on and off the back of a sheep like kids on a playground roundabout;

and worst of all

- under the horse chestnut trees, where poor old Charlie was attacked mid-toilet. Did they mistake his hunched black and white form for an over-sized enemy magpie? The poor cat hasn't run so fast since the onset of arthritis in his back legs. When I finally caught up with him he was at the top of the stairs in the house, wide eyed and panting like a dog, with a messy back end and a chunk of fur (complete with a small patch of skin) missing from his side. 

When these asbo magpies are not assaulting ageing cats, they're snacking on the chickens' layers pellets (which might account for the high number of family members), stealing WHOLE fat balls from the bird feeder (serves me right for snapping off and losing  the lid) or dodging between snuffling snouts to snaffle pig nuts from the trough. Funnily enough, every member of the family is big and glossy! 

I have yet to catch anyone in the act, but I'm pretty sure it's a magpie with a talent for thievery and a nosey beak who plucks the white seed label from the end of the rows of seedlings in the veg plot, gives each label a good pecking, then tosses it aside. Right now I can't tell my purple sprouting from my tat soi or my leaf beet from my beetroot. Brazen, totally brazen!

Dave stands at the bedroom window, air rifle in hand, pretending to take pot shots as a magpie swoops from left to right heading for the chicken run. But that's all it is, pretending. Like the moles who pepper the lawn with mud mountains, the squirrels who strip bark from the sycamore and the housemartins who drop poop on the path, we put up with these little nuisances because life wouldn't be the same without them.

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Here's an interesting fact - the collective noun for the magpie is not a murder. I assumed that perhaps the same collective noun would apply for all the corvids. Hence the blog title. Silly me. It seems a number of birds merit a collective noun all of their own. For the magpie it's a "conventicle", which my online dictionary tells me means "secret or unlawful religious meeting, typically of nonconformists". That pleases me immensely. However, I find the concept of "a herd of wrens" rather perplexing. 

http://www.britishbirdlovers.co.uk/articles/collective-nouns-for-birds

The White Ghosts

I was unreasonably annoyed when nest cam had to be removed from the bird box. I was unreasonably pessimistic when Dave cobbled together am emergency owl box cam as compensation for lost blue tit chick viewing opportunities. More fool me as owl box cam has been an outrageous success. We’ve been privileged to watch the barn owl chicks develop from being a mere twinkle in Mr Barn Owl’s eye, to the gawky, greedy, screechy teenagers they are now. 

Who needs the sharks and Nazis of Channel 5, or the pregnant teenagers and streetwise superheros of BBC 3, when each evening we can flick to the Owl Channel for live action from our own treetops!  There’s mystery – is that one egg, two eggs, three eggs or, oh my God, I think there’s four eggs. Romance – Mr Barn Owl brings furry edible gifts to Mrs Barn Owl. Sex – Mrs Barn Owl lets Mr Barn Owl get jiggy in return for said furry edible gifts. Comedy – how many fluffy owl chick faces can you fit in a 20 cm diameter hole. Suspense – will the fourth owlet ever get fed or will his bigger greedier siblings starve him to death. Dance – stretch the wing to the left, stretch the leg to the right, bob up & down, turn your head upside down. Horror – rodents swallowed whole or ripped to shreds on a nightly basis. High drama – owlets falling backwards off branches, owlets getting wedged between branch and box, and owlets clinging to ledges by just a beak and a claw. All this and more every night on the Owl Channel.

 

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The eldest owlet must be at least nine or ten weeks old as it's flying well. By eleven weeks an owlet should have made his first prey capture and perhaps started to disperse. Ours are clearly not so keen on the dispersal idea. If they hang around much longer, mum and dad will start chasing them away. Better to jump than be pushed (especially when you live above a house of inquisitive chickens), but any day now we’ll flick over to Owl Channel to find nothing but an empty box. The time will come when our four intrepid owls must make their own way in the world. What a sad day that will be, not just by the fact of their leaving, but by the even sadder fact that the first-year survival rate for juvenile barn owls is as low as 25%, so statistically only one of the four is likely to live to see his 1st birthday. So if you’re driving around at night, spare a thought for all those dispersing barn owls, slow down, and watch out for those beautiful white ghosts.

What big eyes you have!

I take back what I said about pesky foreign imports. Or at least I redirect the insult from the nest cam to the Japanese made TV. Turns out that nest cam was in perfect working order. Hats off to the import company who took it back, replaced it without question, and probably put our names on the blacklist of numpty luddites not fit to own gadgets. Although we now had a working nest cam in our possession, it was way too late in the nesting process for us to set it up again. Mrs Blue Tit would be none too happy with a ham fisted human lifting the lid on her house, rummaging around in her nest & leaving her with the beady eye of Big Brother watching as she pops out an egg or two or ten.

Dave came up with a cunning plan to turn the bumble house into a weather-proof camera box (don’t worry, no bumble bees were evicted as the box has only ever housed slugs, spiders & the occasional mouse), cobble together some supports from his ever expanding collection of random bits of wood that may come in handy one day (a true Welsh farmer in the making), and erect the contraption on the tree opposite our owl box.

We’d long ago given up hope of our resident barn owl finding himself a mate this year. He screeched himself hoarse but we’d only ever seen him on his own, so assumed his dulcet tones were not doing it for the females, or worse, that the harsh winter had been too much for all his fellow barn owls. Owl cam proved us wrong. Mrs Barn Owl was in residence. We were even treated to grainy footage of what looked like a spot of owl loving!

Owl cam has no lights and makes no noise, but I’m sure the owls somehow know that they’re being watched. During the day all that can been seen is the sleeping form of huddled up owl, with the occasional wave of the wing or twitch of an eye if the chickens are being particularly shouty about their egg laying. Come nightfall though, Mr Barn Owl starts playing peek-a-boo with the camera….

… before clambering over Mrs Barn Owl and exiting to bag himself a vole snack, leaving Mrs Barn Owl behind.

Yesterday Mrs Barn Owl also left the box for a very short while. Owl cam picked up the shadowy form of the treasure she’d been guarding. Yes, the owl loving has borne fruit and we think there are at least two eggs in the box. We’re bemused as to why she has chosen to lay so near the entrance and our hearts sink every time we see Mr Magpie hovering near the box. He has his own family to look after up in the ash tree behind the house and I fear he has plans to feed them an owl egg omelette. Don’t panic, magpie scaring patrol will now be part of the daily rounds and fingers crossed we’ll have news of owlet hatchings to report very soon.

Swapping Sindy for Spring

This year I am experiencing my first spring. There have been other springs in my life, obviously. I am knocking 40 afterall. The operative word is “experiencing”. As a child I was too busy planning Sindy’s weekly wedding to Action Man to notice the passing seasons. As a teenager my attention was diverted by the contents of “Smash Hits” and “Just Seventeen” magazines and the big questions in life, such as is Boy George really a boy or is he in fact a girl. In the student years spring was all about study and beer, beer and study, and too much time spent in a below ground radio station. There then followed a seamless transition to London, long hours, office walls and a computer screen, when spring was little more than a tree in a pavement surrounded by dog s**t passed en route to a tube or train station. Even the move out of London to a house with a garden didn’t bring spring any closer to me – it just meant more to do in the garden and less time to do it in – spring was a restorative glass (bottle?!) of wine in front of the TV and the occasional glimpse of Bill Oddie on a sofa with Kate Humble rambling on about birds and badgers. Last year, my first spring here in West Wales, wasn’t really any different as my world consisted solely of paint, polyfilla and soft furnishings. This year, however, everything is different. This year I have time. More of it and moving through it at a slower pace. This year I have the inclination. Perhaps it comes with the onset of middle age and watching too many episodes of River Cottage or perhaps it was always there, hidden away, biding its time until all those other distractions fell away. And this year I have the location. Slowly but surely our little patch of West Wales is emerging from building work and neglect and taking on a life of its own.

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Did we always have so many dog violets and primroses in the hedgerows along our lane? Was there always garlic mustard growing just about everywhere? Have gorse flowers always smelled of Hawaiian Tropic sun cream? And who knew that blackthorn has flowers before leaves but hawthorn has leaves before flowers? It’s a tricksy thing is nature.

Spring highlight so far is the blue tit nesting in nest cam box.

Spring lowlight so far is nest cam breaking down just as nest building gets interesting.

There were tears and tantrums but to no avail. Our resident blue tit had done her best to take out the camera by pecking at the cables in the box, risking mild electrocution in the process, but she needn’t have bothered as the simple fact is that the camera’s a dud. Return to sender! Just for once I thought I’d be watching my own footage instead of nest watching vicariously through Packham, Humble & Co. Damn and blast those pesky foreign made imports.

Tit in residence

Here is a Banceithin exclusive, the first video pictures of activity in our nest boxes. The Philpotts (my sisters family) kindly bought me a next box camera. It’s a dinky little thing that gives great pictures even in the dead of night. It also has a little microphone that picks up their tapping and chirruping, unfortunately in this snapshot, you can only hear Teri, and me nagging Philippa.

The Blue tit has been pecking away at the outside of the box, around the entrance. Apparently this can be to enlarge the hole, but it is probably displaying to any nearby females saying ‘come and have a look at my fancy new house!’

The Bodyguard

I’m a hoarder. I have draws full of egg boxes, jars & margarine tubs, bags full of bags, and boxes full of wrappings, ribbons & bows pilfered from other people’s Christmas presents (after they were opened, I hasten to add). Afterall, you never know when something might come in handy for those “if only I had” moments in life. My stash of DVD newspaper freebies, however, had yet to be pressed into service - “The Thatcher Years” never was that perfect last minute gift and there never was a giant dripping tap in need of a washer in the form of a dodgy remake of “Dr Zhivago”.

In an ideal world either money would grow on trees or birds would eat chocolate. If the former, I could buy a 20 metre x 12 metre x 2 metre fruit cage without having to sell my soul to Harrods Horticultural. If the latter, I wouldn’t need a 20 metre x 12 metre x 2 metre fruit cage, and there’d be the added bonus of less chocolate in the world to tempt me and make me fat. Alas, Coca Cola Enterprises has yet to come up with a recipe for the ideal world, so I need to find an alternative solution if I’m to protect the fattening buds on my fruit bushes from the beaks of hungry birds.

This is where the DVD stash comes into its own. The perimeter of my soft fruit patch is now heavily guarded by Hollywood A-listers past and present, interspersed with the occasional ex-Prime Minister and aging rock star – the great (but mainly the not so great) works of John Wayne, Ingrid Bergman, John Mills & Kiera Knightley dangle menacingly by the blueberries, Churchill’s bodyguards and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers glint in the sun ready to blind the bullfinches as they swoop in for a gooseberry bud snack.

 

Now I just need to find a way to stop the cats s******g in the mulch!

Bird boxes

At Banceithin we are blessed with loads of birds, and following the success of the barn owl nest boxes last year, I decided to put up a few more for the smaller species. Having plenty of old plywood from the building, and with a plan from the RSPB web site, I set about building three new boxes.

The size of hole depends on the type of bird they will attract. Having only a 25mm and 28 mm drill bit, they will mainly be for tits, but I do have a soft spot for tits!

We have blue, marsh and great tits here, but we also have tree sparrows, pied flycatchers and nuthatches which could set up home in one of the new houses.

After a couple of days there has already been some interest from some blue tits, but there won’t be any nesting activity until February time.