now all the bonny birds have wheeled away

Ragged robin is see-sawing 
In one half of a coconut shell
He can't find the bacon rind 
Hunger makes his red breast swell.

As I sit and write I find myself distracted because a fieldfare is sitting on the fence in our garden aggressively guarding the tray of mealworms against the the blackbirds and song thrush that are its usual diners. This is a first.

Sitting a few hundred yards away from the sea in town house with a tiny garden, this has been very exciting. I have never seen a fieldfare in our garden, or this close to the sea. In fact, I've only ever rarely seen any at all. As it happens, Mrs Dave and I saw a whole flock of them - a hermitage I believe is the collective noun - on Sunday in a field (funny enough) near Bury St Edmunds. We'd been walking with some friends in a part of Suffolk we don't know very well despite having lived here for about half our lives. We wanted to get a few miles in before the snow came - yes, the beast from the east indeed. Whilst watching a mini-murmuration of starlings over a stud farm, I was taken by a big group of larger birds that appeared lighter in colour, and most definitely weren't lapwings. Luckily I had a pair of binoculars that were just about good enough to see them clearly in a field. Mind you, they were better than the plastic toy ones I had as a child which could barely give a clear view of my feet, let alone a field of identifiable birds.

Due to the two weather fronts that we are currently experiencing and the fact that our house-guest Keats has relocated to Manchester, we have been able to start feeding birds again. It seemed unfair to lure them into the garden with a large, albeit fairly laid-back, cat watching them and licking his lips at the same time (probably as much multitasking he could manage). Anyway, so a seed feeder, peanut feeder, several coconut halves with suet and mealworms in and a tray of dried mealworms have all been placed around the garden. As the weather has worsened the robin, wren and all the tits - great, blue and coal - seem to have disappeared. Well, they seem to have stopped coming in to our garden anyway. Meanwhile, there are so many starlings around that yesterday our garden resembled a scene from The Birds.

A song thrush and a pair of blackbirds have been enjoying the mealworms, at least until our friend the

fieldfare came along today. Another first this week has been the regular visits by a female blackcap but sadly she has yet to appear today. I hope she's survived the cold snap. This has been really exciting and interesting as it is obviously the same one but there is no Mr Blackcap as of yet. As with the fieldfare, in the thirty years we have lived in this house, I have never seen a blackcap in the garden before. As Mrs Dave is now a keen photographer she has had ample opportunity to get a few candid shots of our visitors. The photos here are hers.

Last week I had to take the car to Ipswich for its MOT at a ridiculously early time. This gave me an opportunity to visit the Ipswich Museum which I have been meaning to for some time. The first thing that greets you is a life-sized replica of a woolly mammoth and the natural history of  the area. Various bits of mammoths have regularly been found around this area evidently. Now, the Ipswich Museum which is no longer in Museum Street, was started by various Victorians to allow the hoi polloi to learn about the huge world around them that they would never see. Consequently this meant that the only way to do it was to go out and kill as many animals, birds and insects as possible and stuff them. The heydays of taxidermy. Nowadays, of course, we watch David Attenborough programmes to see most creatures other than cats which we need Facebook for. Still, the reason I brought this up (stay awake at the back there) is because of the museum's vast collection of stuffed birds.

Wandering around the exhibitions became overwhelming and quite sad really. At one point I came across a case with a whole family of great crested grebes within. Two adults with two hatchlings. I actually found this profoundly sad. A whole family wiped out. In the museum there are several rooms absolutely crammed with glass cases of birds from all around the world. The best thing about this, I guess, is that I realised that it is one of the only opportunities we have of being able to compare hundreds of species of birds and, in particular, their sizes. So, for instance, a group of cases featured various British birds of prey so it was possible to be able to see how different a hobby is to a sparrowhawk (and, incidentally, a male and female sparrowhawk - the female being larger than the more colourful male). This all became useful to help with being able to identify birds. I was able to make a decision on what birds we were seeing on Sunday before I got a decent look at them. I guessed they were a type of thrush due to size in comparison with the starlings. I also spent a day trying to decide what our other visitor was. Until we got a photo of her to positively identify it I wasn't really 100% sure of what it was. I knew from the size in comparison to the great tits and look it was most likely a warbler of some sort. If it had been the male I would have known straight away but the chestnut cap of the female took a little longer to be sure.

All in all, I suppose that the Victorians that took to collective mass slaughter in aid of furthering our knowledge of the natural world did do us a great service but I must admit that can be a bit sickening wandering through the rooms full of dead creatures.

One last point. In buying the various types of wild bird food that is now obviously big business, my mind did hark back to my childhood. Growing up as a child in the 1960s without all the distractions available nowadays did mean we had to make our own amusement. For many gentle souls like myself, bird-watching was a lovely quiet hobby that nobody seemed to mind. I-Spy and Observer's books of birds were not expensive and didn't seem to cause any harm. I am glossing over the collection of bird's eggs that was definitely a craze then spurred on by The Observer's Book Of Bird's Eggs no doubt. Maybe I'll write about that another time. Often in the winter months I would sit and watch the birds feeding in our garden in Haycroft Road. In those days the only bird food that seemed available was called Swoop! which came in a small blue box much like Trill which was budgie food that made your budgie bounce with health, I believe. Funny enough, I have not been able to find a picture of Swoop! at all on the internet. We had to buy it in pet shops and I seem to remember the one in Stevenage was called Cramphorns.

The fieldfare is still sitting in our garden fending off all-comers. Still no sighting of Mrs Blackcap.