My garden is flush full of color and life these days. Yesterday was a strange day, and the events should be recorded.
A common yard bird, either a sparrow or a finch, spontaneously developed a new sport. I’ll call it pond skimming.
The pond was put in over ten years ago and I’ve spent countless hours observing the pond and all the wild life it attracts. I had never before yesterday witnessed this strange bird behavior.
I can’t accurately identify the bird because I was observing from my kitchen window. It is much easier to say what it was not than what it was. It wasn’t a catbird, wren, robin, mocking bird or cardinal, and it wasn’t a blackbird or a crow. It was rather small and brown, like a sparrow or a finch. In any case, I was shocked by what I witnessed.
This small brown bird flew down over the pond and dipped itself ever so slightly across the surface of the water and then flew up and circled around and repeated this action at least four or five times. My thought was that it was playing with the fish, though its feet looked too small to catch anything. The bird bath and the flute boy fountain are rather dangerous places with my husband’s feral cats stalking the place. This bird was determined to clean itself and it had come up with an adaptation.
I’m happy to report that none of the eight fish were harmed. They are fairly large now, bigger than last summer. They survived the winter. Last summer there were eleven fish. Three fish were lost between last summer and now. My husband took pictures with his phone of a big hawk sitting on the granite that surrounds the pond. The hawk must have been looking for lunch. No dead fish were ever found, so it is still a mystery how the three were lost. The best suspect is the hawk.
I will return to the strange events of yesterday.
There are two feral cats that make my garden their home. I’m not too happy about this. My husband feeds them, and thus they stay. I’m more fond of the birds and the fish. They have less predatory behavior. Though, the birds can bicker, and yesterday was especially loud.
One of the feral cats killed a catbird, which I’m sure was provoking it. I saw the cat carrying the bird in its mouth. I yelled at the cat and it ran away with the bird still in its mouth. Now and then, I’ll see a dead bird carcass left here and there in the garden. It is usually missing its head which I guess it the main source of the cat’s irritation. It is never eaten. It is a sport kill and not a survival kill.
The cats and I are not exactly friends, though I’ve never harmed them. On rare occasion I’ve threatened my husband that I will. On rare occasion I’ve taken pity on them and fed them when my husband could not. I think I’ve done this more out of fear of what harm they could wreak.
The cats have been warily watching me since early spring. This is the year than I am consistently bringing the beauty back and regularly nurturing its growth. There is no better way for me to feel happy and at peace than in a beautiful garden.
The cats had mistakenly assumed the garden was under their control. They now know I hold the power and that I only tolerate them out of respect for my husband. Yesterday their unhappiness was expressed.
In the afternoon when I sat by the pond to feed the fish, once again I was shocked. As I looked across the fountain bowl to the other side of the pond, my eyes settled upon a dead catbird face down, with its head still intact, floating on top of the water. It looked rather young, and could not have fallen from the sky. I knew then that the cat had decided that its earlier bird kill would irritate me the most by being dropped in the pond. Fortunately I saw it before it had time to become bloated or decayed.
I’m happy to report that the catbirds are still abundantly represented, so there is no fear of their extinction. However, I’m beginning to wonder how long I’ll continue to tolerate my husband’s feral cats.
movingforwardslowly 