Too hot...

..today.

Sitting on swing watching those crazy blackbirds...

So we have Mr B.
We have Mrs B1.
And we have Mrs B2, who appears to be an older female Blackbird than Mrs B1.

Do not ask me to explain this set up because I cannot exactly figure it out.

Mr and Mrs B didn’t produce any eggs earlier in the year.

Mrs B took on various suitors, much to the chagrin of Mr B.

Then disaster for all the hedge sparrows who were nesting all around them. The big bad evil magpie swooped and gobbled up all the hedge sparrows babies.

The hedge sparrows left.

Mr and Mrs B remained.

Then some time later, and this is where it got confusing for me...

Now, we have the nest Mr B made for Mrs B at the left of the garden. And I thought Mr B was retiring to his man den on the right of the garden. (It is an area of clematis protected chicken wire when an elderly cat who is no longer with us decided she was going to climb and eat those babies, ma and pa Blackbird kept dive bombing me, and then I realised). So after removing elderly tabby cat, who attacked me viciously when she realised she was being thwarted, I made the area round the bird nest cat proof.

But in the last couple of days I have come to realise that we have two female blackbirds and one male.

They fly from one nest to the other on each side of the garden, all three of them. There is always one blackbird in the garden on one or other nest, but most usually there are two, one in each nest. The 3rd blackbird goes and gets worms.

Just now it was Mr B who came with worms, to the nest at the right of the garden. He went into the nest. And one of the Mrs B’s flew out and off.

Less then a minute later she is back, but instead goes into the bushes at the left of the garden, into that nest, just at the same moment as that Mrs B who was in the nest, flew out of the bushes straight to the nest at the other side of my garden, where Mr B was waiting to fly off as soon as she entered.

So, Mr B flew straight out, passing that Mrs B who went straight into the nest.

This is going on all day long.

I don’t know how I ended up with one Mr B and two Mrs B’s, and two nests of babies.

This is a very reciprocal arrangement. And although nasty Mr Magpie is still about, he is coming nowhere near my garden...