91热爆

I have a family of wild moorhens in the garden. There`s always a bundle of them, every year, and in winter they come in to join in with the geese, hens and ducks as we chuck the barley down for them to eat.
Their numbers increase each year..the first year I noticed them there were around half a dozen...this year, there`s eleven!
The come into the garden from the surrounding fields, and as I`m usually up early I watch their arrival, though it`s getting harder to see with the darker mornings.
Down one side of the garden there`s a stone dyke, a wall for non Scots, which stretches down the track a bit and faces the pond.
And they nest down that way overnight...so that in the morning you can watch them, like roadrunners, dash across the track and in among the iris rushes to get to the water.
Then after their morning ablutions they dash back across the track...and follow the same path each time, as if it`s laid out like any double tracked tarmac road, only invisible to us two-foots...and they follow the curve of the stone dyke and cut through the wire fence and run through the rose hedge, now bare and dry-twigged, into the garden.
So there they are, this family of moorhens, wee black birds with red beaks and struts like hens, in my garden, a couple of feet away from the window, looking up at me when I stand there and give them a wee wave...as y`do..well, as I do...
and they don`t run away now like they did when they first started coming in to steal the barley..
and the geese don`t chase them away any more because I watched this happen one day, you see, and they have their own tactics for dealing with it...
My geese are well organised...there`s the big gander, the boss, like the Godfather of the Mafia he is, and keeps tight control over the other gander and the females.
And they take turns to stand guard, one of them will stay awake whilst the others nap or feed...usually the ones at the bottom of the pecking order do the most guard duty.
So one day they`d chased they moorhens out of the garden away from the grain...they try to do this too with the hens and ducks but just get ignored, you see....they just run just out of reach then sneak back in behind the geese...
but the moorhens got chased off that day, and I watched them hover around just outside the field fence, watching...
and the geese, fed and happy, settled down to sleep, with the one goose standing guard....
except, she didn`t, and dozed off, standing on one leg, head drooping in the sunshine...
so in snuck the moorhens agains, quick and quiet, and set to with the remains of the grain, and the duty goose woke, saw them and dashed toward them to drive them off.
Only they didn`t..they`d obviously been watching the hens and ducks...so dashed just out of her reach, and then as she turned back toward the grain, eating it possessively even though she was full already, they just strutted in close behind her and picked up what she missed.
And since then, they`ve been here every day.
They share the grain of my domestic birds, they share their drinking water, and they even sleep alongside the geese and hens now....

They are comical wee birds and I could spend hours watching them, if I didn`t have to work!
And the geese seem to have become, over time, more tolerant, either that or lazier....