Saturday 18 April 2009

The death toll rises

Living surrounded by nature is wonderful. This evening I watched two cock pheasants battling it out for supremacy on my lawn, and neither of them took any notice of me when I opened the back door to get a closer view. However, another aspect is not so idyllic.

I live in a house of 28 windows, and every springtime birds of all ages, but mainly young, kill themselves by flying into the glass. Yesterday it was a beautiful chaffinch lying dead on the grass underneath my study window. This afternoon it was an adult male blackbird slumped in the middle of the mint, and not under any window at all!


I can guarantee that at some point virtually every day for the next 5 or 6 weeks there will be a loud thump from somewhere upstairs, and on inspection I will find a small feathered body with its neck broken lying outside and somewhere nearby.

8 comments:

  1. When I was a primary school we had black shapes of predatory birds on the windows.
    It worked, we never seemed to get mad birds crashing into the glass.

    You could cut some shapes out of sticky-back black plastic from a craft shop and stick them on your windows during the critical time of the year.

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  2. Thanks for the tip - I have a blue butterfly on one of the upstairs windows which used to be the glass hit the most, and that has lowered the casualties, but not stopped them.

    It all reminds me of the old joke...

    What's the last thing that goes through a fly's mind as it hits your windscreen?

    Its bum!

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  3. Is the butterfly bird of prey sized?
    Maybe it's to do with the shape, birds must have a way of knowing instinctively which birds are friend and which are foe.

    I like the joke... I shall be spending all night trying to think of a witty reply....

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  4. Just keep the windows open.

    Honestly, its not rocket science!

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  5. If I kept the windows open it would be like a scene from Hitchcock's "The Birds", and I don't look like Tippi Hendren!

    (And before anyone says it, I don't look like Hitchcock either!)

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  6. Could you dress up as either of them?

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