Fledgling goldfinch

Dear Readers, today we were visited by a single fledgling goldfinch, who sat stuffing their face with sunflower seeds in a most indecorous way. They spent a while trying to work out how to get the seeds out, before realising that they could put their whole heads into the hole and extract a selection of seeds. Then, they munched on them in a most reflective way, with bits of feed dropping to the ground and getting stuck in their feathers. Let’s hope they find a more efficient way of eating before the winter comes.

I’ve spoken before about the naivety of young birds, the way that they just sit there when all the other birds are making alarm calls and generally freaking out. This one just sat there when I went outside with the camera, although the pigeons were exploding from the other feeder with wing claps and general brouhaha. I wondered if this one was unwell, but suddenly it seemed to wake up and flitted off into the lilac.

If Francis Bacon painted a goldfinch it would look a bit like this…

And then it’s back upstairs to get stuck into doing a few more project reports for the climate change organisation that I work for these days. Tomorrow, we are having an online Away Day, and we have to find ourselves a ‘fun accessory’. I think that my leech socks would be ‘fun’, but I don’t want to have to wave my legs about in front of a bunch of folk, so it might have to be my Tilley hat. Let’s see how much ‘fun’ 3 hours on a Zoom call actually turns out to be.