Territorial dispute!

Proper scrap going on here at The Nook - the avian hooligans pictured above have got into a row with our newer residents:

I just walked to the Co-op for some shopping and the two sets of birds were shouting and screaming at each other. The jackdaws - those avian chavs - had landed all over the beech trees where the new rookery has been set up. Now, in the jackdaws defence, they've been roosting in those trees for years (and making an awful lot of noise about it) and now these johnny-come-lately rooks have set up home. And, as is often the case with new residents, the rooks complain about the neighbours.

You'll be familiar with this - the rooks are rather like the person moving next to a recreation ground who complains about children playing or the man who buys a house beside a village green where cricket's been played for 200 years and starts actions about the balls landing in his garden! And it's not like rooks are exactly quiet, studious residents.

But here, each evening as the sun begins to go down and the jackdaws arrive back from wherever they've been all day, we get this great kerfuffle of shouting, intolerance and grumpy flying about. After a few minutes it settles down with the rooks at one end of the drive and the jackdaws at the other. But you know it'll kick off again tomorrow!

And at least there aren't any anti-social behaviour orders, lawyers, councils or other instruments of government trying to resolve the dispute between the rooks and the jackdaws. Only humans can create such helpless extravagance!

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