Dear Readers, you might remember that I’m currently conducting an experiment to see whether the birds in my garden prefer orange or yellow doughballs, having ascertained two years ago that there was a definite preference for red. Well, all I can say is that the birds have been a lot less cooperative this year. In total I’m supposed to do twenty trails, ten where orange balls are in the majority, and ten where there are more yellow ones. This is to check that the birds are selecting by colour, not just picking out the commonest colour or in fact just choosing at random.

The tricky bit is that you have to end the trial when there are between fifteen and thirty five doughballs left. I have set my timer to check what’s going on every ten minutes (after all, I do have other stuff to do, like shower and eat), but the little devils either ignore the doughballs altogether or swoop down en masse and gobble the lot. So frustrating! At this rate I’ll have to make another kilo of doughballs.

Fortunately I have managed to get eight trials where orange balls were in the majority, so I’ve swapped to putting out trials with mainly yellow balls, so hopefully I can get at least eight trials of each colour. Then there’s some antsy-fancy statistical work, and then I’ll know whether they actually do prefer orange or yellow, or if they’re just hungry and not at all picky. My report has to be in by Monday 10th February, so it’s very tight.

And it’s not as if that’s all – I also have lots of genetics questions to answer (Transcription! Translation! Quaternary folding of proteins! Don’t ask! But then, it is year three so I’d expect it to be hard-ish, and I can feel my brain creaking open with all the new ideas, so it’s all good. And furthermore, there’s nothing riding on this except my own sense of accomplishment, so I should really relax and just enjoy it.

Now, where are those blessed woodpigeons?