THE DAY OF THE BIRDS......

Since the dive bombing Kestrel incident in the back garden  http://theoldbakery.blogspot.com/2010/12/day-we-found-lawn-and-i-continue-to.html  we have had no really interesting visiting birds. We do regularly see a Barn Owl on the roads immediately out side the village and have had it fly alongside the car at car height for a good few hundred yards, which was really cool.
I made a point of putting out thistle seeds as this is the favourite food of the Gold Finch and as a result we have had several small flocks of them visit the feeder. We have also had some small flocks of Long Tailed Tits which are really nice cute little birds that flick from branch to branch so quickly that you would think that the branch was red hot and they could only tolerate it for a second or two. They come and mainly feed on the balls of fat that I have hanging on a tree. The rest of the time it is the usual Blue Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits, Robins, Chaffinches, Green Finches, Siskins, Black Birds, Pigeons, Collared Doves and a happy go lucky Wren. Both myself and the cat love to watch them, though both with very different agendas!

    In the snow the birds were never away  from the feeders but now food is a little easier to obtain there are not the same quantities but there is always something having a nosh out there, unless the cat is on a walkabout then it is ominously still. So I am looking forward to hopefully getting other birds as the months go by and who knows even a visitor from Africa or the Med.

A few weeks back I determined that I would look in the main house's attic. I had put the visit off as the loft hatch had been halved in size by a stud wall when a room had been added and it was going to be a squeeze. So I finally got the ladder out, removed the three screws holding the hatch in place and also removing the screw that seemed to hold nothing in place I dropped the hatch away.

I LOVE ATTICS.   I love that moment when you first open the attic to a property you have purchased. There is that possibility of discovering a long lost piece of art, a Gainsborough perhaps or an Andy Warhol or maybe some relic of times gone by Like an old sewing machine or even better a trunk full of some ones life's nik naks. I lifted that hatch slowly, warily and with reverence I could almost taste the anticipation, in fact it wasn't the anticipation I was tasting at all but a mouth full of dust and crap that fell from inside the loft hatch, blaaaaaaagh.
And as I removed the hatch and prepared to peek into this 250 year time capsule I was reminded of the opening of tutankhamun's tomb. "What can you see?" asked the people behind archaeologist Howard Carter as he peered through a newly dug hole into the tomb chamber of the boy king Tutankhamun.     "Wonderful things!" gasped Carter. And it was true. Well it was true for him but for me it was 480sqft of loft insulation and 5 nests, huff!
    The space only allowed my head and shoulders to squeeze through, my manly 'man boobs' preventing any further exploration (I wonder if Howard Carter had that problem). I managed to get my right hand through with a torch and it joined my head in protruding out of the attic floor. From the attic I would have looked like a bodiless head with a singular hand growing out of the side of it which by some sort of miracle managed to hold a torch! If it had been a shared attic and by a strange co-incidence some poor blighter had chosen the exact same time to climb into his attic he would have been scared witless. I shone the torch around and apart from a fine grain substance clearly used as loft insulation (knowing my luck ground asbestos from the 60's) there were just 5 birds nests dotted along the north side next to gaps through which some day light seeped in. I have no Idea what bird occupies these nests and I am sure that I shall find out in spring but judging by the biggest, which is made almost entirely from straw (probably from the farm next door) it is either a nest that has been built up over many years or I can expect a Pelican to appear. It is about 2ft in diameter and 6 to 8 inches high.   Mmmmmmm, Pelican eggs.
Now that would be a Bed and Breakfast with a difference!





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