Friday 16 May 2025: Birds ‘n’ books

After a good run, the sun finally went in on Thursday morning and the sky clouded over. We didn’t have any rain, and we don’t have any forecast, but we could do with some now. 

We were getting so many starlings in the garden by yesterday morning that I had to cover the large capacity feeders and just leave out the ground-feeding trays. And the water, of course. The poet, who was working from home, counted more than 50 at one time, and all of our regular and resident birds weren’t getting a look in. So I covered the feeders, but kept the baths and drinkers topped up.

It seems to have worked. We think the starling flock shifted to the duck garden at the back of our house. A few babies still came to empty our bird bath, and there was still plenty of food around. But hiding those large feeders meant they all calmed down a bit, and we were delighted to see our goldfinch gang on the hanging feeders after a few days absence, our blackbird boys and girls, the resident sparrows, robins and wrens, and even our own pigeons and doves.

I still had to go out and top up the baths, and one of the baby starlings was just drinking and drinking the water, instead of splashing through it. We had a (grey) squirrel come and have a munch too. We’ve had a mama hedgehog out there recently as well. We expect her to bring her babies again like she did last year. We had between 5 and 7 hedgehogs at a time last year.

It looks like one of our wood pigeons has been in the wars. He’s got a bit of a wound on the back of his head and is missing a load of feathers, also from the back of his head. He seems to be okay, but he does look a mess. We’ll keep an eye on him but unless he gets dopey, we won’t be able to catch him. We’ll just keep everything crossed he doesn’t get an infection.

I went onto my Kobo account and downloaded the books I’ve bought this week. Honestly, the only place I can’t do this now so easily is on Kindle. Then I grabbed the ones I could off the Kindle and went all the way round the houses to get those backed up onto my computer. I got there in the end, though. 

I watched the final week of the writing with depth course. There was no assignment this time, but there was some good stuff for me to look at and study. Today I start the next workshop revision, which is advanced depth and which, I think, points me to an online lecture to watch as well.

I shared the gig list. I topped up the bird baths. I updated my 36-project spreadsheet. And I made us something to eat. 

I did a load of work on my NetGalley books, adding the latest ones to my Trello board, converting them so I can read them on my Kobo, uploading them to Google Play…There were a load of old ones that hadn’t been moved to Kobo or Google, so now I had compatible files, I was able to do those too.

Now all I need to do is (a) read the books, and (b) review the books I’ve already read!

I amended one of the Monkey Dust posters I made a few days ago and I sent it to the venue. And by then it was the end of the day.

Have a great weekend!