Everybody on this planet who is of sound mind - with eyes to see and ears to hear - finds birds fascinating. From the Indian peasant in his loin cloth hoeing the soil to the jet setting entrepreneur in her high rise office building and from me to you, we all notice birds and they frequently give us pause for thought.
We don't need to be passionate ornithologists or amateur birdwatchers. We don't need to know the names of all the bird species we see. We can still notice birds and be rather enthralled by them. (By the way, this is a "We" paragraph). We can watch their acrobatics in the air. We can observe their feeding habits. We can pick up their feathers or watch their squabbles.
They are the most common wild creatures most of us ever see. They are part of our folklore and our social history. (This is a "They" paragraph!). They are feted in songs and poetry. They are cousins of dinosaurs and reptiles. They can be found on every continent on Earth.
There are about 10,000 species of birds in the world but only 405 species in Great Britain. The country with the greatest number of different birds is Colombia with 1,878 recorded species.
We moved into this humble Yorkshire home 34 years ago next month and ever since then I have fed the birds - supplementing their diet to help them survive. I feed them in every season and i guess I have spent a king's ransom on sacks of bird seed and buckets or boxes of fat balls. In addition, waste bread and scraps of meat or bacon rind end up on our lawn and not in the kitchen waste bin. For birds, this is "The Yorkshire Pudding Diner"and it's all free.
Currently our main visitors are hedge sparrows, house sparrows, wood pigeons, magpies and crows but we also get blue tits, long tailed tits, coal tits, rooks, jackdaws, wrens, robins, jays and an occasional sparrow hawk. Once I even spotted a pheasant out there although we are a mile from open countryside. Of course the swifts, swallows and housemartins of summer disdain our avian diner as they swoop for insects in the air.
A month ago I was walking on the moors of Staffordshire when from a nearby wooded dell i heard another summer visitor - a cuckoo with its familiar and insistent repetition of it's name in song "Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!" across the quiet heathland, calling for a mate. That precious sound - that was once heard so widely in English summers - made my heart skip a beat.
When the last cuckoo sings - that is when England will be lost for good.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/FRWglyQ
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