Fateful Flight & Feathered Fables

I’ve had a traumatic experience this week. I was already becoming despondent because I hadn’t witnessed any blue tits visiting my nesting box for a while. Then one morning while I was doing my ablutions in our en-suite, I heard a thud and realised a bird must have flown into our bedroom window. Now we did have a problem in years gone by with wood pigeons flying into it. Luckily they seemed to survive with no evident ill effects (although they probably felt like hell). We did put plenty of those stick on things on the window to try to avoid this happening, and it seems to have worked well. However I was horrified to see, on looking down from my window, that on this occasion it was a blue tit that had collided with the glass. I raced downstairs and on opening the back door was greeted with the sorry sight of a tiny bird splayed out like Bambi on ice on our glass topped patio table. I was beside myself. On a closer look I could see it was stunned but alive. I rushed inside to get a saucer of water – it was all I could think to do – pathetic really! Anyway, by the time I got back outside it had gone. The immediate sense of relief was followed by panic that it had maybe managed to flutter a short distance, before giving up the ghost – or even worse – maybe a magpie had it for breakfast. I quickly reassured myself that there hadn’t been time for that to happen and spent the next half hour scouring the garden, relieved to find nothing. Poor thing must have had a humdinger of a headache.

The trauma led me to Google, to see if there was anything else I could do to prevent future occurrences. The first search threw up the spiritual meaning of a bird flying into your window – there are many and they all scared me. Then I came across an online forum on the subject of birds colliding with windows – it had gone a bit off track, as these things tend to do. I became quite distracted by one entry:

We had a magpie come in through the dog flap a few years ago. Apparently they will watch rabbits going into burrows & go in to take the babies. They must have seen the cats coming in & out & thought there were rich pickings. The mess it made in the kitchen was awful. The noise made me think we had intruders as I was upstairs at the time & all 3 cats & dog were cowering in the hall.

Can you imagine walking into your kitchen and finding a magpie waiting for you?! This started me on another bird preoccupation – spotting the right number of magpies to avoid bad luck – ie anything but one. You’d be really unlikely to get more than one coming through a cat flap, so surely that means it would be bad luck? We have lots of magpies visiting our garden, and I confess that I do try to ward off evil when I see just one, but my Google revealed that I’ve been doing it all wrong. My usual tack is to give the bird a nod and say ‘Good morning Mr Magpie‘, but it turns out that’s simply not enough. I should at least be continuing with ‘… how’s your lady wife today?’, or ‘how are Mrs Magpie and all the other little magpies?‘. Otherwise I would need to address him much more formally – ‘Good morning general or captain‘ and/or salute him (I’d probably do both just as extra insurance). Alternatively I could say ‘Hello Jack, how’s your brother?’ This all set me thinking – how would I know if I was looking at Mr Magpie or Mrs Magpie and why would his name be Jack? Apparently the only difference is that males are up to 10% bigger than females – but if there’s only one, then there’s nothing to compare it to? There are some other alternatives I could try – doff my hat (I rarely wear one), spit three times over my shoulder (a filthy habit), go cross-eyed to fool myself into thinking I’ve seen two (but that’s cheating isn’t it?) or flap my arms and squawk to mimic the magpie’s mate (I think if Victoria was watching she might be concerned for my sanity and have a quiet word with GR). There are regional variations too, so maybe I should adopt the Yorkshire one and make the sign of a cross. I’m not best pleased with one of my magpie visitors – it has been stealing the lining of my wall basket – presumably for nesting material. Here is the culprit along with the evidence!

Anyway, enough of magpies. On the blue tit front, after all this upset, I did spy one checking out the nest box yesterday and carrying in some bright orange fluffy material it had found somewhere, so all may not be lost – I’ll keep you posted.