Dear Readers, we sat in the garden on Tuesday night (Midsummer Eve) and two parakeets dropped into the hawthorn tree to see what they could find. Parakeets are creatures of habit, and I suspect that these two have been popping in to eat a few peanuts from the feeder regularly for the past few months. Today, alas, there were nasty humans sitting on the patio chairs and drinking shandy,  and so the birds stuck to the treetops with the sun setting splendidly behind them.

The parakeets kept one eye on us for the whole five minutes that they were in the hawthorn. They were clearly munching on something, but I did wonder if it was displacement activity, and that they were really waiting to see if we would go indoors. But one has to keep some sort of balance between having a garden for wildlife, and a garden for humans. After all, the robin keeps coming down and ‘asking’ us to move the pot plants so that s/he can get at the creepy crawlies underneath, so I think that’s quite enough physical activity.

After about ten minutes they headed off in the general direction of Coldfall Wood, squawking as they went. There are apparently designated tracks in the sky that the parakeets follow every day, like small green commuters, though without the problems of signal failures and train strikes. How splendid it would be to be a parakeet!