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The pecking order of who bites who in my garden
Felix Lloyd03.09.08
It's hard to credit that a cat with three legs still likes a scrap but I've got the bills to prove it. I was hauling Jimmie the supermog out of the car the other day after yet another trip to the vet when a neighbour hove by and asked what was wrong with him now.
"He's been fighting and he's got an infected cat bite on his bum, which means he can't walk on his back leg at the moment. He's pretty cross," I say. actually, this is a bit of an understatement. He looks like Tom shortly after Jerry has whacked him with a saucepan.
"Poor Jimmie," says Tony. "I suppose now he's only got three legs he's a target for feline bullies."
Excuse me? Is he mad? This is Jimmie of the Glasgow kiss, scourge of the leafy boulevards of richmond. If there's any bullying to be done, MY cat will be the one to do it, thank you very much. No day is complete without a territorial scrap with the white tom, his particular bête blanc.
Territory is everything. Jimmie's has shrunk because he can no longer climb anything higher than a sofa. This is particularly good news for the birds, who know a thing or two about being bullies themselves. "Pecking order" means precisely that: you peck anyone smaller than you who invades your territory and tries to steal your food.
So the jay and her quiffed baby and the great spotted woodpecker pair get first dibs at the peanut feeder followed, in descending order, by the starlings, green finches and great, blue and longtailed tits. But even the corvids hop it when they spot a squirrel racing along the fence.
Grey squirrels are intelligent, calculating and tenacious and, more to the point, they know where you live. Mine has broken a link in the steel peanut feeder, the better to extract the nuts whole, and that's OK by me. Call it protection money well spent. In return, the wily rodent leaves the garden untrashed.
Yes, yes, I know the greys are incomers who dig up flowerbeds and allotments and steal a few bulbs and the odd vegetable, but look at it from their point of view. They are tough, self-sufficient omnivores. So who gets the good press? Wussy little vegetarian red squirrels who require a specialised habitat and round-theclock protection.
But then just as the resourceful grey menaces its way to the top of the heap, evolution plays its joker and up pops a genetic mutation, the deadly black squirrel, alan Sugar to the grey's Lucinda Ledgerwood. I'm not bothered, though: if any are foolhardy enough to show their noses in richmond, I'll set my cat on them.
