Day 144

Tuesday 11 August

8.20am Started the day with a little unexpected excitement with barking from Mabel downstairs. She was barking at the TV which wasn’t on. After flashes of recalling various scenes from the film ‘Poltergeist’, I discovered that rather than Carrie-Ann stuck in it, there was a blue tit stuck behind it.

After a slowmotion, Benny Hill style, track and trace around the room it eventually made its way out of the front window safely. I now need to sweep up all of the dead insects that it’s flapping dislodged from the ledges of the sky lantern.

9.40am I am sat in the armchair, next to the window in the family room. I can hear the chickens at number one and the cack-cack-cacking of a Magpie somewhere. I can see a steady stream of Great Tits, Blue Tits and House Sparrows at the feeders. Right outside the window, bees and other insects are feasting on the nectar from the flowers on the patio. The sun is having a lay-in this morning, as occasional sprinkles of rain drops scatter dark spots on the patio and parched soil. The cloud cover is too bright to look at and will give way to the sun in the next hour or so.

A Collared Dove dabs away at the ground below the feeders picking up what has fallen from the frenzied feeding above; it seems out of place somehow. How can a bird so smartly presented not have a place at the top table? It probably doesn’t like to socialise with the rabble above. Instead, let the plebs do the hard graft and I will feast on what you pluck for me. A startle from somewhere and it lifts it’s large fuselage off the ground with an odd tweeting-whistle with each flap. All doves and pigeons seem to make that sound when they fly off, I guess it’s the wing beats through the air? Something else to look into.

Well, it turns out that there are a set of particular flight feathers along the doves’s wing that is unique to the families Columba and Streptopelia (pigeons and doves). These feathers agitate the air to make the whistling sounds. Now the amazing thing is, the wilder the wing beat, the higher the pitch. This acts as a warning to other birds that a risk is present. The more hasty the flight, the louder and higher the pitch, the greater the potential danger.

4pm We’ve been to see Dad this afternoon. At nearly ninety years of age he is still loading up his Ford Fiesta with two model planes ready to go flying with his friends.

The morning cloud cover has burnt away and we have blistering bright sunshine again, 31°. Lisa and I are sat outside in the back garden, crispy under foot, drinking a cup of tea and reading. It’s too hot to do much else.

The magpie is in the tree at the end of the garden trying to make a racket; but even he is struggling to muster up enough energy and instead makes a half-hearted clackle. Even the breeze, limply lifting the trailing branches of the silver birch is finding it too hot to try much harder.

I’m looking forward to a curry and a beer and then a late (very late) evening walk with Mabel and the family. Just locally. It’s been a couple of weeks now and things will have changed in the fields around us, it’s harvest time.