Stan and Ollie

Mum likes to keep the local birds well fed. Hence, we get quite a lot of visitors to our garden. There's Pearl and Deane, the coaltits, who nested in our bird box last year but sadly seem to have found more luxurious accommodation elsewhere for this year. Robin, the robin, is very friendly and gets quite confused if mum moves the feeder. It was heartbreaking to see him hovering around by the fence where the feeder used to be, with no way of telling him it had moved across the garden to the ivy (all of 3m away!). Then there's the blackbirds: Scrooge, his Mrs, and the little'uns. He's named Scrooge because he won't let any of the other birds near the feeders when he's there, he can get quite nasty. We have blue tits and chaffinches too, but we haven't named them yet (suggestions welcome!).

My favourites, by far, are Stan and Ollie our resident comedy double act. Two great big, fat wood pigeons. Stop picturing the horrible, scrawny pigeons that live in towns. Stan and Ollie are at least 3 times the size and way, way funnier! When one arrives, the other is never far behind. They swoop in at great speed and crash land into the raised flower bed, to hoover up all the seeds the other birds have dropped from the feeder. Once finished they perch on the edge of the wall, peering over the edge to the grass below. After contemplating and preparing for some time, they finally plop off of the wall. No wings. No flying. Then they run about the lawn, seemingly with no purpose whatsoever, before haphazardly taking off and making it all the way to either the shed roof or the fence, depending on which takes their fancy. They just crack me up. And one (it's kind of hard to tell them apart) was spotted pretending to be a duck yesterday, sat in the stream of water flowing by the front of our house due to ridiculous amounts of rain, splashing the water with it's wings. Daft bird.