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According to ornithologists once you start feeding the birds in your garden you are committed:

“Don’t start to feed them if you aren’t willing to keep up the responsibility for life.”

Who’s life? Mine or theirs?!

I don’t really understand why, once they receive my offerings, they will abandon all of their instinctive, ingrained knowledge of foraging and become incapable of feeding themselves.

Regardless of this warning I believed that I had just such a responsible nature to be able to commit to my garden birds.

So out was hung an extortionately expensive cage filled with the kind of nuts and seeds one would see sprinkled on a ?20 salad in some poncy Notting Hill eatery. Over the next few days I found reasons to go into the kitchen frequently. I stood by the window peering.

The garden had never looked so barren of life.

I decided it was my looming presence that they could sense through the windows that kept them at bay. I took to creeping into the kitchen wearing khaki, holding myself very still, avoiding looking directly at the nuts in case they were upset by the whites of my eyes or the movement of my eyelids. For weeks, nothing. Not even a swinging cage to suggest I had just missed the action.
I started to wonder how long I should expect it to take for the local birds to notice a new feeding place. How does it happen anyway? Does it just require one bird to do a mid-flight double take on his way over my garden? Do they then stake out the new table to check its validity, checking off necessary requirements before they can patronise it?

1. Human restocks nuts regularly - check
2. No cat sitting underneath with wide open mouth – check
3. No strange figures looming in the windows – check
4. Quality of produce equal to that of a Notting Hill eco cafe – check

Is it comparable to a new Starbucks appearing in a previously un-chartered high street? It takes a while for consumers to register its presence and put it on their daily route.

My garden it seems was not on a flight path…..the nuts still sat after two weeks, coagulating, full to the brim and untouched by beak.

I was reminded of Kevin Costner’s film, Field of Dreams and its famous line,

“If you build it he will come.”

But Kevin doesn’t ask the question that would naturally follow such a comment, “But how long will it take for him to come? Should I leave him space to arrive on his own or do I watch and wait around the clock? I need to know, I have other things to be doing and I don’t want to build it and then be waiting around for this guy forever.”

Had the birds still not forgiven me for once having a cat? While Edward was still alive birds did not get fed, rather they were fed upon. I tried to explain to him that the numbers of garden birds were dwindling due to the domestic cat (I’m not sure whether he associated himself with such a term) and I would ask could he not at least limit his massacres to mice. (Not that I wanted him to kill at all). He could not. I would walk barefoot out onto the lawn and feel headless corpses underfoot like shells on the tide line.

When I first attempted bird feeding, many years ago I put out a fat ball. It dangled from a bush by the fence and seemed to be accepted by the birds ridiculously quickly. . . it took just a couple of days to get through a ball - they were loving it, although I never saw them feeding.Then one day, from my bedroom window I saw movement on the ball. . . it appeared to be spinning slowly, like a granny browsing a rack of postcards in a souvenir shop. I bounded down the stairs, was this some kind of rare, shy bird nestling in the bush, painstakingly selecting only the choicest lumps of ball?

No.

I had for the past few weeks been fattening up a large rat. As I came eyeball to bulging, beady eyeball with it, it continued to spin the ball slowly and seemed to be thinking “I suppose you are expecting me to leave now.” It duly tumbled clumsily down through the bush and disappeared in a flurry of violently swaying foliage.

The warm feeling from nourishing such a creature was not quite as satisfying as the pretty little birds. We humans are so fickle! Just because it is a disease-spreading pest, doesn’t come in pretty colours and can’t stop its teeth from going yellow or it’s tail from being bald we don’t want to help it survive, “I want to feed starving little creatures! Oh, but not that ugly one!”

Eventually I was accepted into the Michelin book of bird feeders and now they flock to me. I’m so popular I have even opened a second feeding station.

But now I have got what I wanted I feel terribly burdened with responsibility…what if I move house? Do I have to include a clause about looking after the birds in the contract? What if I put out cumbersome nuts that cause chicks to choke to death? What if they all develop allergies? I have made a rod for my own back and a huge hole in my purse.

How are they so discerning in types of seeds? How do they even know that they are a blue tit a

ANOTHER Air NZ CHARTERED Vincent Aviation flight!!!!!! It must be cheaper than running your own planes!
Air Nelson must have forgot they still have a saab 340A doing nothing in the corner of the airfeild! The aircraft is still registered and pilots, flight attendants and maintenance guys are all trained for the type!