The Birds
Hello,
I hope that you are happy and that all is going well for you.
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I am having a good day so far except for hearing that my son’s fiance was knocked off her bicycle today by a horrible swine of a motorist.
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She was cycling along and the driver behind obviously did not like the fact that she was correctly taking up a car space. This man started beeping his horn continually and surging right up behind her. She got scared by this and pulled into the gutter whereby he immediately shoved past her and she ended up thrown from her bike onto the ground.
The two drivers who had been behind the aggressive driver rushed to help her, while the man just roared off without bothering about the accident he had caused.
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When I spoke to her later I found out that she has lost lots of skin from her hands, arms and legs. The scabs are now forming and she cannot close her hands, and she has sprained her wrist.
Sadly, the beautiful new solitaire diamond engagement ring she was given when my son proposed, only one month age, has had two of the claws damaged. and one side looks as if it has been through a coarse industrial sander.
What a horrible thing to happen. I hope that it doesn’t cause her to decide not to use her bike again as she has enjoyed going to work on it for years.
That nasty man probably thinks that he got away with it but one thing I do know, and I have seen it too, is that what goes around comes around.
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As you know, I have been feeding the birds for a few weeks now.
The upside is the fun of watching all the crows squabbling over the food.
They dive bomb each other regularly and appear to think that the piece of bread that another crow is eating is infinitely more desirable than any of the other pieces that are lying peacefully on the extra wide coping stones on top of the patio wall. Just like people really I suppose.
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The downside is that they are pooing all over my patio and the wooden furniture.
There is so much shit all over the place that one could suppose that they are deliberately coming round just to do it there .
Base ingratitude I calls it Guv!.
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It can be quite strange to see their reaction to different offerings of food that I put out for them.
To be honest I have never really fed lots of birds before so I have been putting out huge amounts of bread and adding leftovers too.
For instance, I had bought some ham which I discovered had a lot of horrible gristle running through it, so I chopped it up into pieces and put that out for them.
They would not eat it at all.
Is this a rejection of ham generally or just such bloody rubbishy ham that they considered it inedible.
After all, crows probably have standards too.
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Did you know that Gypsies used to say “Good Morrow Mr. Crow” whenever they passed one, so that the crow would not be angry and put the evil eye on them ?
I was not told that by an actual Gypsy in person, I just read it in an ‘All You Want To Know About Gypsies’ type of book when I was a child, but I thought it was cool and it stuck in my mind.
I have done it ever since and no crow has ever put the evil eye on me so it must work !!!!!!!!!!!
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So far the birds have really liked pasta with pesto, golden corn and kidney beans with balsamic vinegar, the last packet of Warburton’s Potato Pancakes, toast and marmite, porridge oats, and haloumi cheese.
The cheese went like free drinks in a pub.
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Many years age, when I was out exercising the beautiful German Shepherd we owned at that time, he found a baby bird hiding in a field amongst the long grass. ( This was a dog and not an actual shepherd from Germany).
I shooed him away and picked up the poor creature. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen.
It was big, with only wrinkled pink skin and very bulgy eyes, with pathetic bare wings.
I put it inside my jacket and brought it carefully home.
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In order to keep the dog away from it I put it the bird in the cloakroom and fixed a tall piece of wood across the inside of the doorway so that when I opened the door it could not run past me . I had no idea what to do with the tiny creature but after a lot of thought I got a large eyedropper with a bulb on one end and then I then got some Kit-E-Kat and mixed it with water so that I could draw it up the tube. After that it was just a case of feeding the bird a lot of food every day
Over time the cloakroom got very messy but the baby grew more and more like a proper bird. I remember being very interested in what make of bird it was.
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It turned out to be the the biggest wood pigeon ever.
It was named Walter Pigeon, after the well known Hollywood actor of the forties , although obviously the pigeon was not much of an actor.
Eventually Walter went out to live in the patio garden and I fed him by tying a tin tray to the railing and putting pigeon seed on it daily.
All went swimmingly until one day he flew through the the open back door into the kitchen and got scared.
He tried to fly out of the window and smashed his head on the glass.
Eventually he flew out but he never came back to visit me.
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He did however become quite notorious and people would ask me if I had seen that huge pigeon that was flying around and say that he was a monster of a bird.
I admitted to nothing.
Of course he must have been an alpha pigeon, because before very long there were many other really huge pigeons in the vicinity, much to everyone’s amazement. True sons of Walter.
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This was way more successful than my earlier attempt to rescue a baby bird in distress.
Many years before we had been visiting Bamburgh to look at the wonderful castle that stands directly upon the beach.
As we walked up the main street in order to find a cafe we heard a bit of a commotion going on in the little green in the centre of the village.
It turned out that a bird had fallen from the nest and had been cornered by some young boys who were throwing stones at it, so I chased them away and asked a shopkeeper for a box. We brought it back home with us and within hours it was eating Kit-e-Kat out of my hand,
What an amazing feeling.
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After that great success I put the bird back in the box for the night and pushed it under the table.
It was then that I saw the little red spidery things that had crawled off the bird and onto my hand. I was horrified and went to wash my hands and arms twice. I then decided that I had better hoover the floor in case they were running all over the place.
Of course I did a long and thorough job of it too.
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Later, when I peeped in the box, I saw the bird was lying there all dead.
Obviously I had terrified it to death with all the noise when I hoovered around it’s box.
Oh , I felt so awful and guilty about killing him. It just goes to prove that excessive amounts of housework can be dangerous to life.
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Birds are not the only ones who appreciate cheese. I still keep buying the stuff because I lust after it, even though consuming it gives me a migraine.
Thankfully, when I get it home and start to put it in my mouth, I usually get overtaken by self preservation again and refrain from the temptation.
Normally I just give it an Olympic standard sniffing and then regretfully chop it up into squares as an offering for the jubilant birds.
Never mind, it helps to keep the cheese industry in profit in these dark times and no doubt there will soon be queries about giant crows infesting the place. However I don’t expect that they will grow as huge as Walter did because his diet was very rich right from him being a tiny orphan.
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Anyway, I would love to chat for longer but it is well past dinnertime and I have some nice Stilton to sniff before I feed it to the birds.
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LOL
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Hi Mike. Glad you like the site . Regards.
