Feed me! First magpie fledgling of 2026

 The first fledging of the year in the garden yesterday - a very demanding magpie, with two harassed parents that were feeding it with worms and insect larvae collected from our neighbour's lawn. 

Looks like these birds have only fledged one offspring this spring, but they have been battling with crows and squirrels that have been predating their eggs and nestlings. Usually they raise two or three fledglings in their spring brood.

Wood pigeons: the mating game

 The wood pigeon breeding season in our garden never seems to end, but it reaches a peak in spring. Show-off parabolic flights, ridiculous chasing, bowing and tail-fanning courtship rituals, bouts of violence between rival males - all part of the endless pageant of ornithological entertainint when I look out of the window.

Here are a few pictures from a recent performance.

A seemingly disinterested female looks on while rival males slug it out with wing blows, until one is knocked off the fence ..... but wait, he's not deterred ...

.... he circles back, swoops so low over his rival that he's forced to duck his head, sees his opportunity and descends on the female ...

.... who is taken by surprise while his alarmed, outflanked rival looks on ..

.... but she bats her assailant away with her wings...

----- whereupon the outflanked bird seizes his opportunity 

... and so it goes, most days in March and April

Dog's mercury and the perils of colloquial plant names

 

Everyone looks forward to finding the first primroses, violets and bluebells blooming in spring, but the flowering of dog’s mercury Mercurialis perennis never gets a round of applause. But what it lacks in beauty, it makes up for with ecological gravitas and toxicity.

Dog’s mercury is common in woodlands almost everywhere and spreads via an underground rhizome, so large patches tend to be good indicators of very old woodlands and hedgerows. There are separate male and female plants, with the former being rather more common. This is a male plant, with stamens protruding from the tiny flowers.

Old colloquial plant names, like mercury, can lead to potentially dangerous confusion. The pot herb Good King Henry Chenopodium bonus-henricus also goes by the old name of English mercury and it is edible but dog’s mercury is most definitely poisonous. John Gerard, referring to it as French mercury in his herbal of 1597, seems to have confused the two, which may be why he wrote that it ‘cleanse and scour away the excrements and other filth contained in the guts. It serveth to purge the belly, being eaten or otherwise taken, voiding out of the belly not only the excrements, but also phlegm and choler.’