Published: Friday, 30th May, 2008 12:00
The changing garden pecking-order
By Maurice O'Brien
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Maurice O'Brien, Reading's favourite columnist
COWERING indoors from the weekend’s spring holiday tempests tends to concentrate the mind on ecological imbalances.
On the telly England’s cricketers were edging to victory in pale Mancunian sunshine while simultaneously my brand new, mini-wheelie bin was somersaulting down the garden to the shock and awe of a greater spotted woodpecker, clinging desperately to a violently swaying peanut holder in his perilous quest for a calorie-enriched diet.
During a more tranquil moment on Saturday, attempts to quench the birds’ thirst was thwarted by the presence of an indignant looking frog squatting in their bowl without, as it were, room to swing a cat.
Meanwhile the reward for not using slug pellets is ground-level vegetation riddled with bitesize holes, and petunias gnawed to the core. Until last year the hedgehogs would have emerged from their purpose-built winter billet beside the shed to rebuff nocturnal slug incursions with deadly, almost SAS-style efficiency.
But that was in pre-badger days.
Two badgers now routinely snuffle around together on the back lawn and strive vainly to reach whatever’s left on the bird table.
Startling enough when venturing to the bin in the early hours, but decidedly spooky when confronted by their ghostly forms while returning home from a Friday night session of medicinal therapy.
Hedeghogs, I gather, are natural prey for badgers, and ultimately bad news for my poor old petunias.
Odd wildlife behaviour does have its compensations; not least the stately lady blackbird who materialises at my feet every time I venture into the garden, hopping after me to the kitchen doorstep until I’ve parted with a handful of goodies from a packet of Waitrose mixed fruit.
In contrast, the neighbourhood cats, evidently neglected and close to malnutrition, obsessively seek out scraps of bird food and leave foul-smelling evidence of their anti-social visitations in border and bush.
But they’re clearly not proper cats.
Surely real cats would have sorted out the mice who spent last winter in my garage, nightly nibbling the plastic bits off a complete set of expensive spark plugs.
Forget global warming.
What the hell happened to Tom and Jerry?
- THE triumphant glee of Harriet Harman and her fellow members of the Sisterhood of Spite aside, there should be many members of Parliament still profoundly disturbed by last week’s overwhelming Commons vote to maintain the 24-week status quo on abortions.
From either side of the argument it is clear that babies are definitely viable outside the womb at 23 weeks, and often much earlier.
So, for the life of me I struggle to discern the wafer-thin line between legally terminating a fully-breathing baby in the womb with a deadly injection, or letting it be born and then homicidally pulling the plug from its respirator.
Must be murder for our MPs, having to make decisions like that.
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