Despite any momentary delusion to the contrary, I was recently forced to acknowledge I am still a soft townie at heart. Having opened the door for Cat to go out, apparently always preferable to the cat-flap, I took a stroll around the garden in the early evening. It’s a funny thing but even in a garden your eye picks out things that are not right or that have been recent additions. Like fox poop on the lawn or a pile of feathers signifying the sparrow hawk has struck again.
Anyway I digress. In this case it was a small honey coloured lump near the Liquid Amber tree. Thinking a gull had deposited the remains of someone’s packed lunch on the grass (don’t go down to the Quay with your lunch unless clasped tightly, no really), I approached it to remove the blot on the lawn. Strangely for a cheese and onion sandwich it appeared to be shivering, but undaunted I continued. Turns out it was not a product of the chiller cabinet at all, more a product of a distinctly more avian kind. At first I thought it must be a duckling since it was covered in down, but on closer inspection it produced a distinctly un-canard like beak and truth be told was a tad larger than you might reasonably expect a duckling to be. As described by Wife, it had the sort of beak it would need to grow into, much as a puppy grows into its ears. Since it was still very much alive she called our vets who said “Oh you need to talk to the Bird Guy, I’ll give you his number”.
Of course there’s a Bird Guy, there’s a guy for everything else around here so why wouldn’t there be a Bird Guy? So we rung him up, described the small miscreant to be told it was in fact a Wood Pigeon chick. Yes it was the progeny of a seemingly never ending dalliance by the two Wood Pigeons who always seem to be ‘at it’ in the garden. And this is when we realised we were still well short of being country folk. We drove half way across the Forest to deposit said small bird into the tender care of the Bird Guy instead of dealing with it ourselves.
As it happens, it was a more than worthwhile trip as, after we saw the little guy settled, we did the tour. Something I didn’t know up to that point was that if you stand too close in front a Tawny Owl in a red shirt (no, I was wearing the shirt) it flies to the front of it’s enclosure and shows you just how impressive its talons are. And very impressive they are too. But the highlight for us was seeing a European Eagle Owl (Scientific Name :Bubo bubo, I kid you not) up close in all its glory. Apparently it had been purchased off the Internet and kept in a wardrobe by some crackheads in Southampton but had been bought by the Bird Guy after the police decided they were not interested. Though not exactly numerous here, there are growing numbers making it across the Channel using their wings rather than the Information Superhighway and are big enough at nearly 70cms to take small deer. Could be a tad tricky to re-home.