The ornithological post!

Today we are having a bit of Christmas shindig at the Italian conversation class. It’s one of those things you do at adult classes: everyone is supposed to turn up with something to eat or drink and you keep your fingers crossed that you don’t end up with ten lots of mince pies or ten bottles of wine and nothing else. By some kind of magic, it usually works out fine.

So, with these festivities in mind, this morning I stuck my robin redbreast ear rings in my ears and pinned on my jingly robin redbreast brooch. You have to get into the spirit of things, after all! And then I scanned the newspapers online and found this article about what murderous little beasts robins are. A “vicious, murdering bully” is how the robin is described. Apparently 10% of adult robin deaths are “robin-on-robin incidents” and they get into fights with other birds too. They use their cute, pointy beaks to sever the spinal cord of their opponent! Well, I knew they were territorial but, as we often have several in the garden at the same time, I had always disbelieved the story that you only saw one in at a rime in the same area. I never had them down as the tiny thugs of the ornithological world though. It just goes to show that it’s not just your screen idols like Kevin Spacey who are revealed to be beastly! It also applies to our feathered friends and heroes! Who knew?

And yet we have always had this sentimental view of robins. After all, it’s a robin in “The Secret Garden” who reveals to Mary the whereabouts of the key to get into the eponymous garden. And did we not all learnt that nursery rhyme about the north wind blowing and the snow coming and asked what would poor robin do then, poor thing? It turns put he would probably viciously attack another robin!

It seems that robins got in on Christmas back in Victorian times when postmen wearing red coats were nicknamed “robins”. Then robins carrying cards in their beaks appeared on Christmas cards. And, besides, they stand out so nicely against the snowy background of a sentimentally white Christmas. And the rest is tradition!

But I’ve got my robin-themed Christmas jewellery on now and I can’t be bothered changing it.

The writer suggested that we replace the robin with little jenny wren. Wrens, he maintains, are bit like us in that they will snuggle together for warmth. And they have a very nice, cheerful song. Okay, but they are perhaps a little drab. I am pretty sure I saw on on the outside window ledge of our bedroom this morning.

If it wasn’t a wren, it was something very small and brown and feathery. Then I came downstairs and saw a tiny blue tit on the outside window ledge of the living room. This is clearly my morning for bird spotting! It’s good to know we have something in our garden other than raucous rooks and quarrelsome magpies. We do get an awful lot of both of those and it is a delight to see these quite large birds trying to hang upside down from the bird-feeders our neighbour fills, presumably with smaller birds in mind.

While I’m on about birds, the other day I was amazed at the number of starlings there were by the tram stop in nearby Ashton-under-Lyne. This is a species that is supposed to be growing scarce, or so I have been told, and yet there were masses of them, all singing quite tunefully as well.

Life is full of surprises!