BowAndArrowMan

A month ago, I blogged about the start of spring - see  https://bowandarrowman. blogspot.com/2024/03/spring- has-sprung-here.html . One thing I noticed were two sparrows flitting in and out of a privet hedge in my front garden. I assumed they were building a nest. I enjoyed watching their movements through my kitchen window. However, over the last two weeks, I've not seen the sparrows. They seemed to have gone. I now know why the sparrows have gone. About four days ago I saw a cat disappear into the privet hedge where the sparrows hung out. I immediately went outside to make a lot of noise to shoo the cat away. And then two days ago, I saw a magpie disappear into the privet hedge. My guess is that cats and magpies have eaten the sparrows' eggs or, if hatched, the fledgling sparrows and that the mummy and daddy sparrow have flown away to find a safer place. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity based in Britain, estimated that domesticated cats kill up to four...

Magpies are birds of the corvid family, which also includes crows, jackdaws, jays and ravens. Magpies are widely found across the world, especially in parts of Europe, Asia, North America and Africa. Magpies are one of my favourite birds here. They regularly frequent my garden generally to scavenge for food. I always blame the birds for pecking open my rubbish bags in search of food. I'm perhaps unfairly blaming them as I once saw a rat bite its way into a rubbish bag. The reason there are sometimes rubbish bags in my front garden is that after about ten days there's no room in the large wheelie bin - the council only collects non-recyclable rubbish every fortnight here. Do you have magpies where you live? Allen William Seaby's A Magpie in a Pine Tree , c1906: In England, magpies were and still are often seen as bad fortune or good fortune depending how many are counted. The book, Observations of Popular Antiquities , published in 1780, is the first known record of coun...