I’ve never lived in a place where there is so much bird busyness in our airspace. Recently, the hundreds of jackdaws that roost in the old ash trees of Bishops Castle’s gardens have started putting on dramatic aerial displays. It usually begins in the treetops with a burst of raucous chaka-chak-chaking and then a huge whoosh that disturbs the air, and all for no reason that this human can discern.

The flocks stream out from their roosts, billowing and swarming over the town. Then there is swirling, dividing, and swarming once more. Not quite the mesmerizing dance of starling murmurations, but almost.

And then, at last, when whatever needed to be sorted out, is, they return to settle once more in the treetops.

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This particular tree is on the hillside above our house.

And then, in between the jackdaw shows, there are the red kites to spot – sometimes in pairs, sometimes singly. Again, they cruise above the town and we often have a good view of them while we’re eating lunch. This is one advantage of having our dining table in the sitting room while the new kitchen is being built. There’s a nice big window for sky viewing. And that view of course presently includes the swooping and diving of swifts, swallows and martins.

Meanwhile in the garden we have a regular mob of sparrows who treat the place as their own, dust bathing, trawling the hedges and borders for seeds, doing a spot of aphid grazing on the hollyhocks. There are also blackbird fledglings who appear as soon as I go out to the vegetable patch. They are so hungry they’ve given up being afraid of me, and flutter around my feet as I’m digging, piping loudly for grubs and worms.

All of which is to say the local birds are presently providing a happy diversion from the mega-disruption in the Farrell roost. The building work goes on and on, but I think we’re over the biggest hump. More of which in the next post. For now a soothing view of a less common sort of bindweed – a perennial weed that in the large flowered version is usually plain white and mostly regarded by this gardener as a flipping nuisance.

Here in Bishops Castle the hedges, including ours, have been colonised by this pretty pink and white  variety. In fact it’s the one asset in our hedge of horrors, and there’s a lesson here of course. Cue Monty Python’s Always look on the bright side of life and so never mind the hedge that thinks it’s a forest and can’t be tamed till August, or the house that’s full of building debris and occupied by two fuddled humans who no longer know where anything is.