Chantal and Lou regularly look after each other’s cats to cover for holidays – Lou lives in Stoney Stanton, about three miles away, and they “cat sit” for each other, ” visiting daily to feed, water and give the cat (or cats in our case) a few minutes company. It is usually straight forward. Last week Chantal looked after the Hill’s cat Marley.
We got a call on Saturday morning – Marley had caught a fledgling and was to be kept in solitary confinement for the week to prevent him catching another one. The “victim” was currently still alive on the patio. In our household the bird would have been either carried to a suitable sheltered and safe place, or humanely dispatched (always my job) as appropriate, but neither Hilly nor Lou “do” birds, alive or dead, in the same way that some people don’t “do” spiders. We decided we would go straight over and sort out the bird.
Hilly was still packing the car, and the bird was still on the patio – well sort of since it had hopped around a bit and fallen down a drain gulley. It was clearly a healthy blackbird fledgling, but too young to fly. Daddy was swooping around calling frantically, and so we decided to place the fledgling behind a shady shrub with a shallow bowl of water, leaving daddy to provide the occasional grub.
On Sunday Chantal noted, while watering the garden as requested, that the fledgling was still alive and well, with Daddy clearly undertaking parental duties. In fact that he was so paternal that he was having no surrogate mother anywhere near his child. He promptly started to repeatedly dive bomb Chantal, who dropped the hose, which fortunately had a trigger and so stopped spraying, and fled indoors, where she and Marley sat watching Daddy check out the fledgling. No doubt Chantal, Daddy blackbird and Marley all had different ideas about what was the best thing for the fledgling.
Chantal returned home, forgetting that the outside tap was still turned on, and in her absence the hose nozzle flew off, and the hose, without human assistance, continued with the task of watering the garden, all of the garden, extensively, continuously and at length. Eventually water flowed under the garden fence, and the neighbour peered over to see the hose leaping and writhing around the garden like a demented snake, liberally spraying everything in sight. He had to lift the fence panel and crawl beneath to turn the tap off.
Meanwhile, down in Kent, Hilly and Lou had discovered that some of Emily’s essential medication had stayed at home, necessitating a return trip by Hilly who arrived back home to find he had the only garden in the neighbourhood that resembled a steaming swamp after a hot day. There was an exchange of text messages (whatever happened to phone conversations?) as Chantal explained what had happened, much to the amusement of Lou and Emily.
On Monday and Tuesday the fledgling was continuing to do well, and Chantal left care duties to Daddy, who was clearly doing a grand job, but sadly by Wednesday the hottest days for a few years had taken their toll, and the fledgling had succumbed. Nature is tough, especially when aided and abetted by a cat.
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
