an unidentified nest with a ball of unidentified chicks....
I have been trying to figure out how many birds’ nests there are… lying awake in the dawn this morning, listening to the cacophony. I think there are at least two just outside our bedroom (that’s as well as the bats); and there’s two or three more in parts of the rest of the house. So, half a dozen in or on the fabric of the house itself. Then in the stables block (which contains the bar) I’ve come across at least two more, one of which is the swallows we watch swooping around and in and out of the bar. But that’s only the ones I’ve actually seen; I haven’t been actively searching for them. And in the trees and bushes in the garden there must be dozens more. The birds live here; we are only interlopers.
Unfortunately, it is not just the birds who live here. We also have mice, moles and rats. The mice would be properly controlled by a good mousing housecat, who would also either eat or scare off most of the birds, so we put poison down a the end of the summer and tolerate, with annoyance, the mess they cause. The moles are a real pain, mainly for the tunnels they make which, when they collapse, turn once-smooth ground into lumps and furrows. The rats don’t usually come into the house (although a couple of years ago we found a drowned one in a toilet cistern: horrible, but a satisfying explanation for a smell that had had me very worried about the state of the plumbing), but are a consequence of keeping chickens. I haven’t actually seen them, but there are suspicious holes in the vegetable patch where the chicken run was first positioned. I don’t know whether we should plan to eliminate them with traps and poison, or work out a peaceful co-existence. My inclination is the latter; but rats generate strong emotions….
Posted by ejoftheweb on July 16, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Apparently the unidentified chicks in the nest are sparrowchicks. And they had, by this morning, fledged, or become someone’s dinner, because the nest is now empty.