Recently the bird feeder, so beloved by the greenfinches, has been attracting different visitors. First to turn up late one afternoon were two great tits. Not much of a surprise perhaps in many gardens, but here on the islands where the numbers recorded each year can be counted on the fingers of one hand, it was a pretty good sighting.
They stayed no more than 20 minutes before flying off across the field, never to be seen again.
But if they were just passing through, the second unexpected arrival, a field mouse, was a local. When first spotted it was not actually on the feeder at all but clinging to the twiggy upright branch of a venerable wind-stunted elder growing next to it.
Unable, we assumed, to find a foothold on the smooth and slippery broom handle to which the container full of peanuts was attached, the mouse had sought another route to it and now was tantalisingly close. Yet not, it seemed, quite close enough, for though, with whiskers aquiver, it strained forward as far as it could, the nuts remained just out of its reach.
Nor was the breeze helping, for every now and then stronger than usual gusts would strike the branch, twitching it a little further away and leaving it quivering while the mouse hung on waiting for relative calm to return.
Eventually, having had enough, the field mouse gave up and, turning tail, descended surefooted to the ground where it disappeared among the bedding plants. And that, we thought, was that.
But by the next morning the little creature had, one way or another, solved the problem and was breakfasting on the peanuts.
Bold as brass it stood with one foot balanced on the little bar that provided a perch for birds, while the other three grasped the feeder’s crisscross mesh. Reaching, twisting, changing its grip as it stretched for particular nuts that attracted its attention, it ate without pause, until, alarmed by a sudden noise, it reacted with the lightning speed of any small prey creature and ran head first down the broom handle to safety.
Twitter: @GdnCountryDiary
