Feathered friends and furry ones

St Firmin
Yesterday's weather: Lots of rain!

As an addendum to yesterday's blog Jon has asked me to add that other things that go screech in the night are owls, and there were plenty of them screeching the other night when he was out investigating the cat fight.

Which leads neatly on to one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time - Alan Titchmarsh's programme on BBC 1 last night: The Nature of Britain. The programme was fascinating, well constructed and the photography was just amazing. No, my amusement wasn't caused by the Titchmarsh who has come a long way since Ground Force where he did little other than wind up Tommy Walsh and tease Charlie about, well, her Charlies; I just giggled at the sight of three cats looking all over the house for the birds.

Misty's ears were like radars listening for aircraft, they almost turned a full 360 degrees trying to work out where the noise was coming from. Figaro sat up and looked at the TV but couldn't quite work out whether those flickering images really were birds or not and even Jazz opened an eye to see if there was a snack in view. Not that birds are their favourite snack, they are much to much like hard work to catch when there are dozens of furry creatures and you just have to sit and wait for them to pop out of their holes in the ground.

They may have been more confused because the birds they were listening to were skuas who were busy bombarding the Titchmarsh who had dared to get close and look at one of their babies. It was amusing TV but more amusing cat-watching. They have certainly never come close to hearing anything like a skua but they obviously knew what that noise meant.

Interestingly, when we were seeing images of 7 million screaming starlings doing their incredible evening ballet before diving into their reed-bed beds for the night they didn't bat an eyelid. They obviously realised that they would be severely outnumbered!

Whilst on the subject of birds, I hear on the grapevine that the cranes we saw migrating north at the beginning of March are now heading south again. They don't chatter in the same way when they are heading south so we will have to keep our eyes peeled skyward today. Luckily it is a beautiful clear sky so I hope we may be able to spot them.