Staring Me Out.

This will be the last of my "bird table blips" for a while unless something spectacular turns up. We have had both greater black-back gulls and buzzards, though not both at the same time, they make our bird table look tiny.
This chap seems to have adopted an aggressive pose though, in reality, it was only a fleeting posture; in order to achieve any sort of acceptable picture I needed to anticipate a static moment and hope it remained until the camera had responded to my clumsy touch.

Times have changed since we moved into Roslin over thirty years ago - I wonder how many times I've said that since I started blipping. In the early days when we first started feeding the birds, we would be inundated with starlings but they wouldn't arrive until 11:00 am regardless of when the food went out. We assumed they commuted from town - probably Waverley Station. At 4:00 pm they would depart homeward even if there was food left, perhaps they had a train to catch. These days they sit out there waiting, about a dozen of them, and they pounce before all the food is out having to rush to grab what they can before the rooks and jackdaws scoff it all; as soon as the food starts running low they all bugger off to the next restaurant leaving the blackbirds and a robin to clean up the left-overs. At this time of the year the blackbirds do not seem interested in defending territory, they prefer to concentrate on eating so we often have twelve at a time; one of them is fairly tame, I often wonder if it is related to the pair that nested in our pantry about five years ago.

About a day after hatching the eggs the female got in a panic and had to be rescued, it was a hard decision for us to make as we expected her to desert - which she did. The male got stuck in as a single parent and, as I worked locally, I used to dig worms for him out of the compost heap before going to work, at lunch time, after work and late in the evening. He was very recognisable as he had missing tail feathers and he became quite tame; we were able to keep track of him, and the chicks, until he moulted in the autumn.
Since most small birds only seem to live about eighteen months, I doubt if there's any connection but, it's a nice thought.