sparrows' leavings
This is the time of year that I usually post some photo or other of the flowering cherry on our front lawn. This year though, the blossoms are looking a bit thin, something I put down to the crap weather. So no photos thus far.
But then we noticed the sparrows attacking the blossoms. They seem to be snipping the blossoms near their bases, presumably to get nectar. This is new behaviour for this year, at least around here, and I wonder where they got it from? Maybe they copied the tuis, whose longer beaks allow access to the flowers without damaging them?
Unfortunately, the sparrows have created quite a bit of damage, with most flowers now looking like this:
Worse, many of the flowers just drop on to the lawn. I’m getting a bit concerned that our favoured tuis will miss out; and later on, in November, the kereru won’t have any cherries.
We can chase the little blighters off, but half an hour or so they’re back: a little flock of avian destroyers.
I want to KILL them ALL.
Or… maybe there’s a whole new export industry there in the making: once we catch them, we can export them to China.
Seeing as how we probably won’t be sending much milk powder there in future, an alternative export opportunity right now probably wouldn’t go amiss.
Shirley
15 November 2008, 07:33 #
Don’t kill ‘em – when I was in NZ it was great to see flocks of sparrows behaving like they should, dashing along hedges and edges as we drove by. We don’t get big flocks in England now – too “sanitised” with no seed spillage and everything tidied up. Just throw them some seeds instead and they may leave your flowers alone.
I only had 3 weeks in NZ but believe it or not we failed to spot a tui! Obviously didn’t spend enough time in Wellington.
Could you export possums to China for the clothing industry, since Oz won’t have ‘em bac?. We’d like to send our grey squirrels back to the USA, before they kill off all our red ones.
Alan
15 November 2008, 09:54 #
It’s OK Shirley – I wouldn’t kill them. I value all the birds in the garden. Even the starlings that nest in our roof. (Well, maybe them not so much.)
Funny you should mention the possums – they are actually an uncommon species in Australia. In your travels you may have seen something called “Merino Mink” – that a new textile made of a mixture of wool and possum fur. So we are using them a little bit.