Just me and the jackdaws
I’m taking a day off today.
Yesterday I cut the grass and did a grand tidy up. I then lashed out a couple of thousand words in the old memoirs.
Today I decided to do nothing.
So I’m sitting here, half dozing and half watching out for the fucking jackdaws.
You may remember [I don’t, the memory being what it is] that those fucking jackdaws nested in my chimney last year so when I lit a fire in the front room for Christmas, the house just filled up with smoke? Naturally I got rid of the nest with a judicious poke of my chimney-rods.
The fuckers are back. What’s worse they seem to think they own the place and not just my chimney-pot. Not only do they make a hell of a racket when I’m trying to relax out in the sun but they seem to think that I have put out the bird feeder just for them. The cunts keep crashing onto the apple-tree, bending all the branches and trying to grab seed out of the feeder. We used to have loads of tits, finches, goldcrests and robins feeding there but they have all been scared of by the big black marauders.
Luckily jackdaws are wimps. The slightest threat and they shoot back up to the chimney again, so I spend my day shouting obscenities at them. One loud “fuck off, you cunt” is enough to see them off. Unfortunately Herself is taking exception to this and is worried about the neighbours. I told her that the neighbours are intelligent enough to know I don’t mean for them to fuck off, but she still keeps telling me to stop and I have to think of their sensitivities. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about without taking on neighbours’ sensitivities?
The jackdaws are lucky I’m taking the day off. Otherwise I’d be in the front room ramming chimney-rods up their arses.
There’s always tomorrow?
"Today I decided to do nothing."
Did that yesterday – but I couldn't tell when I'd finished.
It's easy enough. You just do nothing until you do something. Then you'll know you've finished.
We have a duck call thing (blow in one end and a horrendous noise comes out the other) as well as a crow call (works same way but an even more horrendous noise than the duck) for scaring off the hoards of grackles that tend to gather in our trees and "talk" to each other–what a racket that is–and raid the bird feeder. The neighbors still keep looking to find out where that awful sound sound comes from but at least they don't try to hide their children anymore.
Same in my garden – the jackdaws had pushed out the finches etc. I have found some seed and fat-ball feeders which they cannot raid: one from Roam-Wild, which has lightly sprung perches – a heavier bird landing on them closes the feeding hole. And 'squirrel-proof' (not 100%, but not bad) fat-ball feeders from Food-4-Wild-Birds. These completely flummox the pigeons and doves too, so it's back to just finches, robins and tits (oh, sorry, that's the neighbour sunbathing).