A song thrush has treated me with early morning visits to Dave’s Walkwood garden. The usual fare is blackbirds, including one juvenile that pecks at nearly everything in sight – I guess it'll learn – so it’s good to see this speckled member of the same family. I associate it with the first inkling of the massive population decline in birds. Ten years ago those headlines seemed to solely concern song thrushes until a dismaying cohort of other species joined them – skylark, yellowhammer, marsh tit, grey partridge, bullfinch, corn bunting, inter alia, and now even house sparrow and starling.
Walkwood does hang on to a few marsh tits, bullfinches, sparrows and starlings, more so in the winter. In July the most obvious birds seem to be wood pigeons, the jumbo jet of the back lawn. As I type, a jay flies across; a few days ago, a family of three manoeuvred through the coppice over the road.
Having bred for the year, black-headed gulls are back on the school playing-field and regularly lope over the house. A sparrowhawk – a female, it was so large (too much to hope for goshawk in these parts!) – flap-flap-glided past as I pulled in from shopping yesterday. And of course I see the usual tits, finches, corvids, dunnocks and robins. We don't need to worry about them.
Do we?
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