From the Outside Looking In.

As I write this on the 7th of November, this little chappy has been a source of entertainment for a month or so. At first we didn’t realise what was happening, it was the gardener who pointed out that he was attacking his reflection in our windows; but then, while we couldn’t see the reflections from the inside, she could from the outside.
 
At first, he was indulging in what looked like typical human displacement activities, stripping the bark of the twigs upon which he perched then, when he ran out of bark, he moved on to removing the leaves. He started flying up and down pressed against the window and then hammering on it with his beak. I am aware that wood-peckers have a special design modification to their skulls to cushion the shocks, but this little fellow is probably suffering from a permanent head-ache – or worse. There are times when we wonder if he is worrying so much about defending his territory from himself that he may neither be feeding properly nor keeping a wary eye out for predators. Mortality is high for small birds, particularly at this time of year, they can barely store enough fat in their tiny bodies to keep themselves warm over a cold winter night and failure means dying of hypothermia; that is why a bird specie like this may try and raise two broods during a summer, each one from a dozen eggs. When Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” he didn’t mean that the weakest would not survive but that the vast majority would not. A pair of blue tits might be lucky enough to live to breed for two successive summers, that would mean laying nearly fifty eggs – yet to avoid a either population explosion or collapse, each pair must produce an average of two, and only two, adult offspring in their life-time. The harsh reality is that the rest just don’t make it.
 
As an interesting aside, if I am running to escape a tiger, I do not have to run faster than the tiger – just faster than the man next to me.