Hey there, welcome to my blog. My name is Sian, I’m 28, I live in Scotland and I have a chronic illness called M.E. What is M.E.? M.E stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis. It is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). How long have I had ME? I developed M.E 2 years ago at the start of September. I was about to start college to study beauty therapy and the day before I had a headache. Ok, no big deal, everyone has headaches. By the evening it had developed into a migraine (you know, when you can’t stand the light, or sounds, and you feel like you’re going to throw up). I didn’t think too much of it and hoped it would be gone by the morning. Well, it didn’t go. In fact, I had that same migraine constantly for 6 months straight. What did you do? I got on with it. I started college the next day, and I attended every day I was supposed to until I couldn’t handle it anymore, which was Christmas 2016. What ...
I have backed away from social media recently because my health hasn't been great; I've been mostly bedbound since Wednesday.
You know what I miss when I'm stuck in bed... the little birds in the garden. Over the summer I started watching them and learning things about them. Since then, I have seen quite a variety of birds coming to the garden to enjoy the food and shelter we provide, we even saw little chicks playing and bugging their parents for more food.
There are about 30 house sparrows which seem to live in the bushes, they are the most vocal and demanding of food. They love chirping and cheeping and being generally noisy. When their young fledged I often saw them flapping their new little wings and squeaking wanting to be fed.
They eat from a mixture of hanging feeders and ground feeders. Different species have different preferences on how they like to be fed, for example blackbirds won't (or very rarely) use hanging feeders or anything too high off the ground. The same goes with dunnocks (used to be known as hedge sparrows).
I have become very fond of our frequent blackbird visitor, Mr. B. He often basked in the warm summer sun with me on the grass, or on our recycling bin as in this photo.
He and Mrs. B had 3 nests in the garden (that I'm aware of) over spring and summer, blackbirds only use a nest once and then they create and move to a new one for their next clutch. I thought they were unsuccessful, sadly only 1 out of 4 blackbird nests will result in chicks, but at the end of summer we spotted what looked like a juvenile blackbird (they often look like the females, they are brown in colour and don't have a yellow beak or eyering like male adult blackbirds) in our nextdoor neighbours garden. I was so happy to see they had one fledgling, he was soon nicknamed Junior, and he visits the garden looking for food.
Mr. B and Junior are much braver than the other birds, sometimes when Denys or I open the backdoor, they will fly across and land near our feet wanting mealworms and raisins. Junior likes to announce that he's there when I'm filling up the feeders, he'll often appear from under the bushes and make a popping noise at me until I give him some food.
I'm looking forward to when Mr. B and Junior sing in the springtime. Mr. B had a habit of perching on a bit of roof right above our TV, and he would sing his little beak off, often meaning we had to turn the volume up just so we could hear our programme. I don't know if you've ever listened to a blackbird singing, and have noticed the series of squeeks and pops at the end of their song, but next time have a listen and then think about R2D2 from Star Wars, they make the same sounds!
I get a lot of joy out of caring for them, almost like a pet. Seeing them eating and singing in our garden makes me smile, and so I really miss it when I'm stuck in bed. I was able to get downstairs to feed them today so that has given me a little boost.
Thanks for reading.
That ME Girl
Comments
Post a Comment