Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
I had to let it out again today. No, not my waistline, nor a dog. It was a young blackbird.
Last Thursday a carer, who also does some gardening, and I, made a cage around the raspberries using some bamboo poles and pigeon netting. As my wife D says, we don’t want the raspberries escaping. As the carer and I worked, a young blackbird (let’s call her Polly) sat few feet away in a red currant bush, plucking green berries and swallowing them whole. It shows how dry the ground is that Polly’s preferred food - earthworms - are not available. Possibly the berries are are not only food but also provide moisture. Why doesn’t she drink and bathe in my bird bath? Usually Polly and her kind will wait until the berries start to redden before stealing them but Polly risked being close to humans to eat them green and sour. The carer chatted to Polly and got within arm’s length before Polly fluttered a few feet away. As soon as the cage was finished she was back.
D and I like our soft fruit. The plants - strawberries, raspberries, red- and black- currants - hardly need any maintenance and they crop well - but they do need netting or the robbers rob them.
The day after the raspberry cage was built I went over it, using scientifically designed clips (clothes pegs) to close some gaps we’d accidentally left. Then I built an extension cage to cover the red currant bush. On Saturday morning I looked out of the kitchen window to see Polly hopping about in the red currant cage! I went up the garden, lifted an edge of the net and chased her out.
These days I try to check the fruit cages morning and evening every day. I used to used flimsy, green strawberry netting which had a mesh size of about two centimetres. Back then I was struggling to balance D’s illness, our son’s needs and ever-changing and increasing demands at work. Gardening got done when I could. I once went up the garden after a gap of several days to find a large grass snake thoroughly tangled up in the strawberry net. I thought it was dead.
Sadly I picked it up to cut out the corpse. The snake gave a spasm, stank to high heaven and died in my hands. The stink is a standard defence mechanism. I decided that in future I would use to coarse, black pigeon netting on my ground-growing plants as it was less likely to entangle wildlife. However, never wanting to waste anything, I continued to use the green netting round the top of the fruit cages.
A year or so later we had some visitors and my son and I showed them round the garden. A small, brown bird, possibly a dunnock, was tangled in the aerial netting and appeared lifeless until it twitched when touched. It was impossible to untangle it so Colin rushed in for some small scissors and we cut it free. To everyone’s delight and amazement it flew off unharmed. I threw all the green netting away and advise against its use. Thicker, less flexible netting is safer - but sadly not wholly wildlife friendly. Hedgehogs, for example, will push their heads through mesh about one-and-a-half centimetres diameter and become trapped by their spines, unable to back out.
Last year I thought I had made a secure and safe strawberry cage. As usual, small birds, including young blue tits, found their way inside. I think they had pushed in under the bottom edge of the net but couldn’t find their way back again. I lifted one edge, chased them out and tried to close every access and gap. Again it was a day or two before I checked for ripe fruit. I was horrified to find a dead sparrow hawk, tangled in the netting by one leg. It had obviously stooped onto a small, trapped bird (which had escaped) and its talons had caught in the mesh. It had flapped round and round, twisting the net ever tighter round its leg until it eventually died. This year I have used fine mesh galvanised netting (‛rabbit wire’) at ground level round the strawberries with pigeon netting as the roof. So far, except for Polly in the red currant cage, no birds have been trapped this year.
In case you should think our garden is solely a death trap, I should mention our bird boxes, bird bath, bird table, fat balls hanging outside D’s window, bug box, frogs in the long grass, bumble bees nesting in the roof and others burrowing in the lawn, a log- and a rock-pile for small mammals and invertebrates, our wild area, a wild species hedge we have planted and our tolerance of the local badgers who dig up our lawn for worms if and when there are any. We used to see hedgehogs every year. They bred under next door’s old shed, sadly removed some years ago by some new owners. We have giant house spiders in the garage along with False Black Widow spiders (which we treat with respect) and a host of shield bugs, garden cockchafers, lesser stag beetles and other creepy crawlies of interest in the garden.
On a positive note concerning fruit cage captives, two years ago I found a Redwing inside with the red currant bush. This big cousin of our thrushes comes over in hordes from Scandinavia in winter each year, in flocks that will strip all the holly berries from a tree in a day. It was obviously on its summer holidays when it targeted my red currants!
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