Birds

So many birds. After mourning the deaths of at least five nestlings over the last week, I discovered a real live sparrow fledgling in the back yard on Tuesday morning.

This is him:

Isn't he cute?

Last year we had another little fledgling making our back yard his home which you can see here. He was also cute but mysteriously disappeared. Our sparrow fledgling, however, is still with us. Yah!

He's made a bush in the back yard his home and his poor put-upon mother visits regularly to keep him topped up with worm protein. He keeps trying to fly and, much to his personal chagrin, keeps failing badly.

Yesterday, it occurred to me and my darling that he's hung around quite a long time now. Surely there's a time limit on this sort of stuff? I mean he's very handsome and all that so he obviously has good genes, but you can't take that to the bank. Surely there are fledgling development goal posts he should be meeting?

Turns out there are.

Sparrow fledglings should leave the nest before they can fly. Confusing to a non-bird species, but tick.

After 1-2 days on the ground they should be able to fly. ????

Their parents will continue to look after them for 14 days. Tick. Good parents.

Looks like our little fledgling has missed the big one. He's now scared of us, which is good because on the first day he didn't even know that much, but he should've been flying by now. I'm starting to think he's a special needs sparrow.

That's fine now, while he's all cute and stuff, but after a few weeks I'm not sure I'll feel the same.

Oh well. Cat duty (where my darling runs full tilt at any cats who dare to cross the threshold to our property, hissing and waving his arms) will remain in force for another week.

In other bird news we started to suspect there was a nest in our spouting due to the number of nestlings falling to their deaths on our driveway but without the benefit of any trees being nearby.

This was confirmed when a stick poked out from the side of the spouting and even when I poked at it with a broom I couldn't dislodge it. A nest in your spouting may be fine if you live someplace hot and sunny, but in Christchurch we occasionally have rain and the spouting serves an actual purpose.

My darling fetched a ladder and dislodged it.

Now, I have used some artistic license in the above renditions (yes that is too art!) as there weren't actually any eggs in the nest. The nest also wasn't particularly well-formed and couldn't even be added to my bird's nest collection after being forcefully thrown onto the driveway with a broom handle because it broke apart into dried grass. The nestling dilemma remains unsolved.

However, I'm certain there's some manbird out there right now sweet-talking an impregnated loved one into coming back home to his nest to lay her eggs and he's about to get a bad shock. Rather like picking up a pregnant woman by saying you have the perfect home for her to have her baby, then taking her to the public park.

Poor little soldier will just have to start again somewhere else. On the bright side at least he won't have to deal with the potential hassle of taking care of a special needs fledgling.

There is no 'i' in 'keyboard'

Seriously, there's not. Look at this.

There it should be, snuck between the U and the O but instead it's nowhere to be seen.

I like to think that the world doesn't revolve around me but from the look of my keyboard my favourite letter in the world is quite obviously I.

The E is on its way out as well but that's perfectly understandable being the commonest letter in the English alphabet and all. I know this thanks to reading Misery by Stephen King as a youngster and it having made a great impression upon me.

I also seem to recall that the second most used letter was R and unless Stephen King was deliberately misleading me, something which I cannot for the life of me fathom a reason for, then it should also be on the way out. It's not.

The S is looking a bit shaky and the O looks like a second U tilted to one side, but the rest of the keyboard is feeling just fine and dandy, thank you very much.

Maybe I type words ending in "oise" a lot and that's the source of my trouble.

The reason they're wearing away at all can be firmly laid at the feet of my high school education where I was forced, along with the rest of my third form class, to learn to type for three months. Three months.

We learned with aprons covering our fingers, a large chart showing the location of letters on a keyboard on the wall, and manual typewriters. Only the last of those is relevant to my current complaint.

If you've built up the routine of hitting a key as hard as you can with your finger because if you don't it won't make a mark on the paper and also built up the muscle strength in those said fingers, you don't just lose it because the technology changes.

Three months nearly thirty years ago and I still thump away at keys as though they need to depress a full inch. At least I've lost the habit of using Twink to cover up my mistakes. Messes up the screen, that.

Moist

This word makes my skin crawl and my stomach churn. And not in the good way.

I try to avoid things that are moist, require moistening, have been moistened, or were once moist, but this word still haunts my dreams.

My darling hates my large variety of dwarf fruit trees with a passion. He would prefer that the entire yard was covered in concrete while still somehow having daffodils bloom up each spring. His concession to not concreting it is to cover as much of it as he can in lawn.

Where I used to have a couple of vegetables gardens, there is now grass. Where there was a patch of wildflowers that self-seeded each year, there is now grass. Where I once had a beautiful collection of Jerusalem Artichokes that hardly ever got around to growing their bright flowers, guess what? Lawn.

Every night after making his usual threats about what in the property is going to be cut down as soon as I die, my darling heads outside to MOISTEN his seed.

I am not joking. This is what he says. Every night.

The only benefit is that after saying it he heads out of the house for ten minutes to water the lawnseed. By the time he arrives back inside I've usually managed to choke back my nausea.

Right now, so soon after the latest episode, my only dream is to outlive my darling and plant a new fruit tree in celebration each month thereafter, until there is no more room left.

Instead of lawns, there'll be the patches of ground that have fruit trees on them, have fruit rotting on them, or are being dug up to have fruit trees on them.

Yeah, it'll be so great when I rule the world. Maybe one day I can even talk myself into eating fruit.