…With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

…I awoke this morning to find a single black olive in the centre of the patio.  It was not one of ours.  I wondered where it might have come from.  We have bungalows to either side of us, both of which are more than an olive stone throw away, and a cemetery behind us – I don’t see the olive being launched from there.  It must, I thought, have been dropped by a bird, but I could not think either of a bird that would think about carrying an olive nor, possibly more intriguing, who might fill their bird feeders with them.  This is not St Tropez!  And the olive was un-nibbled.  If it had been carried there by the resident squirrel, surely it would have ventured just a little taste before abandoning it.  (I love olives, but I have many friends who would sooner squat bare-arsed over a nettle patch than chew on a single cracker laced with tapenade, even though most of them have never tried it.)  It had to be a bird, and if it was a bird, it would have to be a crow.  Nothing else around here would get it off the ground.  We have a few crows roosting in the tall trees that surround the graveyard; one of those could easily have dropped an olive-sized object into our garden and thought “Oh bugger.  It’s not worth the bother of picking it up.  I’ll have my Martini without one,” but where did it come from?  My wife suggested somebody’s bin and, despite the fact that even the most buffed-up corvid is unlikely to be able to lift the average wheelie bin lid, I decided to accept the bin/crow theory as the most likely given all the available facts.

I don’t much care for crows having watched on helplessly last summer as a solitary bird pillaged a long-cherished blackbird’s nest and took the chicks, one by one, up to a nearby roof where it ate them, knowing full well that I was there – its little beady eye was firmly fixed on me – but comfortably out of reach.  It was a challenge – we both knew it – and it won hands-down.  I understand the value of crows in carrion clearing: without them we would be knee deep in squashed hedgehogs and farmer-dumped badgers, but this was seriously outside of its job description.  I am a lifelong veggie, I can’t even eat beetroot because it looks too bloody, but I would have ripped the little bugger apart if I could have got hold of it at that moment.  The pain of it boils in me even now.  I have spent much time since we moved here scanning the McQueen borders in an attempt to find a solitary representative of the local murder* to chase away, although to be fair, I have yet to see one actually set down on our own little corner of this sceptered isle. 

So it was, that I ventured out into the garden on morning crow patrol and spotted the last mortal remains of a blackbird on my lawn.  When I say last, I really do mean last because except for a fairly neat, but widely spread circle of feathers there was nothing, not even a beak, for his family to bury.  How they would identify the body, I have no idea.

My first thought was to accuse a local feline perpetrator, but we are unusually devoid of cats around here, besides, I have some experience of catkill and it usually far messier than this with the more indigestible bits and bobs of the victim scattered hither and thither for me to retchingly clear away.  This looks far more like a bird-strike: the detritus of the devastating impact of a large raptor left behind, but the prey itself flown away for consumption – like the aftermath of a teenage visit to a McDonalds Drive-Thru – but this is an English country garden, not the wide-open backyards of Carolyn or River, and there is little room for the strike of a hawk.  The lack of space in the vegetation that grows between our fences is exactly what makes this such a safe haven for the prey species with which it is stocked – or so we thought.  We have an ever-present buzzard who soars over us, but I seriously doubt that he would be able to manoeuvre into the space we have to offer without clipping his wings on the trellis. 

Our garden has dozens of the smaller birds: tits, sparrows, robins and the slightly larger blackbirds.  We also have wood pigeons, ducks and, of course, the ever-watching crows.  I wondered, could they be our killers?  Well, according to Google, crows do hunt adult blackbirds – they are opportunists who will eat almost anything they can turn their beak to (with the possible exception of olives) – so it is possible, which also makes it possible that I now like them even less than I did.

As I type this I am watching a little robin friend flit to and fro into the hedge in front of my office window, his beak full of nesting material which he drops only long enough to admonish me if I interfere with his work by walking through the gate, and my eyes cast up to the garage roof where the crow sits and watches.  It reminds me of ‘Death’ in a pack of tarot cards.  I try to formulate a plan to protect the powerless, but it is easier said than done.  Perhaps I need to Whatsapp somebody in the American government…

Unlike the area surrounding the homes of the brilliant bloggers mentioned above, our garden does not offer sanctuary to groundhogs, skunks, or deer.  Even my failing eyesight allows me to clearly view the decay in the fence panels to all four sides without moving from the centre of the lawn.  (Indeed, it is impossible to leave the centre of the lawn without falling off the edge.)  Our garden stretches as far as the eye can see, only because the fences prevent you seeing further, but it does offer space for hedgehogs, squirrels and birds.  We have mice – a brief scan of the shredded cushions we carelessly left in the shed will affirm that – but I am yet to spot a cat prowling the garden.  Our friends in Canada have bears and caribou; we have slugs and piggy beetles.  It must be some sort of evolutionary offshoot: back onto 10,000 acres of Indian Savannah and you have elephants on the doorstep; curate a little garden in England and you may find signs of shrew-ingress if you are lucky.  Yesterday I was excited to find a centipede.  We are surrounded by nature, but it is all in miniature.

Which brings me to one final, but inescapable possibility: pixies.  We almost certainly have them somewhere in the nooks and crannies of our little patch and whilst I do not see them as hard-eyed, cold hearted blackbird killers – that is far more likely to be the elves – they are just the sort of miniature being that I could imagine carelessly dropping an olive on the patio.  Although it would be quite a big deal for an pixie, protein-wise, so I suppose they might well be back to look for it.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled and let you know…

…Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed… In Memoriam – Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*The collective noun for crows – but you knew that, of course.