Yesterday, on my way down the stairs for my morning shower, I heard a tapping noise coming from the direction of our downstairs recreation room. What could it be – surely not the mice wearing shoes and having a party!? No, of course not! It was one of a fanatical pair of Robins hoping to get in to build a nest on the sunlit shelf of one of our basement windows. He/she was tapping away at the glass and, despite me closing the blind, it just moved over to the downstairs office window and started again. Once again, shooing it away didn’t stop it, and my wife and I kept disrupting it, to no avail, throughout the day. Talk about being tenacious: it didn’t want to take the hint, which it must have, because the rain today seems to have dampened its ardour and we are living in peace again!
Despite all the distraction provided by the Robins, we were not ignored by our other birds, as they slowly come back into our lives, and Spring shows signs of joining us too. With the water now having thawed in the bird bath, the Robin took a quick splash, as did a returning male Brown-headed Cowbird. These birds are not quite so welcome, due to their parasitic behaviour of laying their eggs in another birds nest, which are then reared by the unsuspecting host bird.
The Cowbird’s eggs tend to hatch earlier than the host bird’s, and it is able to dispose of the other fledglings as they hatch. Its propensity to do this is causing concern for the population numbers of quite a number of song birds.
On a more cheerful front, we witnessed today the return of a pair of Bluebirds, spotted in our garden a week ago, to have another look at our nesting boxes in the rain. Will they nest? That remains to be seen, since they tend to have more than one nest, just to fool any of their predators, and us! Hopefully, they will choose us for their summer abode, as I hope many of your garden birds will for you. Have a great week enjoying the birds, but, above all else, stay safe and well.
Cheers,
John Baldwin
