Sorry everyone but I have to get this off my chest and get some moral support from someone who likes birds and has some understanding how destructive cats are and how precious our indigenous wildlife is!
I live on an ex council estate and the housing design, tiny gardens and proliferation of cats means that in the 10 years that I've lived here we've never had a bird nest in our garden, so we were delighted earlier in the year when a pair of robins looked to be building a nest under a ramp that goes from our upstairs floor down into the tiny garden. Under the ramp we've got shelves built and the shelves are packed up with plant pots and it was in one of these pots that it looked as though the nest was being built.
Over a period of weeks the nest was built and my two young sons and my wife watched daily for evidence that food was being taken to the nest and sure enough mid April it started to happen.
Every now and then my wife would catch a cat in the garden staring up to the pots on the shelf 8 - 9 foot up and shoo it away. The pots are all precariously stacked and it would be daft for a cat to even attempt to get up there.
Recently the activity has been intense and we were beginning to hear the chicks chirping as the parents flew in to feed flies and worms. Then this evening I was in the kitchen and heard a horrendous crash and knew immediatley what it was by the sound of the crashing terracotta pots on the floor. I rushed out to see the cat scarpering across the garden and making it's exit. I looked down beneath the ramp and there all over the floor were the chicks - still in their nidifugous state all vulnerable all spread across the pavement with the nest all crushed and the contents of the pot dispersed (leaves). I scooped the chicks up and reshaped the nest and the support materials back into a pot and placed them all back in and back up on the shelf - but at a lower level and in a different place. I recall being told as a kid back in the 1960's that if you disturbed nests with eggs in you could potentially cause the birds to give up on the nest so I was concerned that if I took too long getting it all together and back up this might happen and both birds were in the garden only yards away showing signs of distress!
I retreated back in and we all watched to see if the parents would return and whether they would seem to resume feeding and it looked as though this was the case despite the nest being relocated about a foot lower and in a far more exposed position.
We re-grouped and thought that we'd better raise the height back up to it's safer height and original position. I also put the original pot into a deeper pot so that the nest would be obscured further more from cats but the bird could hide more readily, but I was concerned whether the bird would find the nest as it was inside a new pot? All went well and the birds continued to feed.
Since then we've surrounded the pots and the shelf with chicken wire to protect it from another cat attack.
Unfortunately I noticed that when I scooped all the birds up there was blood on my hands and one of them and it didn't seem to be the bloody one was very poorly and limp (Concussed)? The other 3 despite falling 9' seemed okay. The parents are now too-ing and fro-ing feeding despite the wire and the new plant pot. So it looks as though I've managed a half decent damage limitation exercise and maybe 3 of them will survive?
Please if you have cats can you make this cat your last one and encourage other people not to keep them or if they do - keep them inside. There are far too many cats in this country 10,000,000 too many. We should implement the same kinds of rules with regards cats as they do in some Australian states whereby people are employed to shoot/destroy them (As far as I know legitimately) if they're seen between dusk and dawn.
-made worse when it then walked up to the missus
and let her stroke it
)
Linear Mode
