Friday 23 May 2025: The birds in our garden

This is the last of my favourite pictures taken on the phone while we were doing the NC500. We saw sheep and lambs everywhere we went, and these were snapped at the end of the tour as we walked from the campsite at Beauly into the town.

First job of the day was watching Week 4 of the advanced depth workshop again. They tell us to go back over the workshops again until it sinks in what they’re saying, and this second time around it seems to be doing just that. I didn’t bother with the last 2 assignments, though, as they’re all about finding certain kinds of writers and copy typing the openings to their stories. The writers he suggests just aren’t in my orbit, not to my taste. And life’s a bit too short to spend reading stories I don’t particularly like when there are so many I do like still to read.

I’ll do the research he asks us to on writers I like. After all, the exercise is all about finding out what grabs you and then keeps you reading.

Bird life in the garden is ramping up and it’s a massive distraction. Aside from a baby greenfinch struggling to work out how to get food out of the tube feeders but then settling for sitting in a dish that catches seed and gorging there, there’s also the wood pigeon with the deformed beak who has to scratch the food into a pile so he can get at it with his tongue. There’s the wood pigeon that looked like it had a pointy head but had actually been scalped (he seems to be healing, by the way). And now there’s an adult starling that seems to have broken its foot and is learning to eat standing on one leg.

I don’t know if these birds have been in fights, if they’ve got stuck in a feeder, or if they were born like it, in some cases. But watching them manage is heartening. I haven’t seen Scruffy Magpie since before we went to Scotland. I’m hoping he’s got chicks in the nest and is doing the looking after while his partner forages for food. We’ve had only one magpie in the garden for a few weeks.

And then there’s the usually nervous jackdaw who gets braver and braver every day, feeding himself on the fat pieces and seed but then filling his beak with mealworms to take back to the nest. The blackbirds have gone nuts again and there are more appearing with the tell-tale white feathers, so they must be from the same gene pool. Two of the males insist on squabbling. I don’t know if they’re siblings or rivals. Or both.

The starlings are like something out of The Birds at the moment. There must be a hundred of them squawking their heads off, demanding to be fed. They’re not proud, any adult bird will do. And sometimes they just sit there watching the pigeons or the blackbirds eating, wondering why they’re not putting food in their mouths!

Wonderful fun, but as I say, distracting.

When I could tear myself away, much of the rest of the day was all about books. Writing more reviews and scheduling them to post here or posting them to NetGalley, Instagram and Amazon. Updating my reading log. Choosing the next book to read. Creating graphics. Collecting books. We had some good news yesterday. NetGalley can finally send books to Kobo, so I registered mine and collected 3 books just to see if it worked. It did. But I’ll still send them to Kindle too so I can post reviews on Amazon.

I shared the gig list and then finally turned to the great novella challenge. I’m writing the second Rainbow book instead of the first Mathilda book. I’ll see how far I get before deciding whether or not to stick at around 15,000 words.

Short and sweet today.

We have a bank holiday weekend this week. Have a good one!