Tonight:
10°c
Saturday morning's strictly for the birds
Felix Lloyd22.04.09
I'm being winked at by a Little Owl. Apart from its eyelids, the bird is motionless in its ancient oak, and very hard to spot. A couple of black shire horses are idling away the morning in the tree's shade, one upright, the other flat-out with equine exhaustion. A battalion of rabbits has erupted from a warren beneath a hawthorn over to the left; the babies are dainty Easter bunny-size, the adults look like Thumper on steroids. A pair of pied wagtails are briskly mopping up rabbit-moithered bugs.
I'm not in the country, of course: I'm on a free guided walk in Richmond Park on Saturday morning. At least 50 people pitched up at 8am so we split into two groups, with a couple of experts apiece. These city-dwellers are clued up about nesting sites and preferred habitats, recognise every bird by its song and know that what I think is a high-flying 747 is actually a low-flying skylark.
The only bird to elude the experts is the lesser spotted woodpecker, no bigger than a sparrow and the rare one of our three native woodpeckers. But the Little Owl is celebrity enough in its own right and rounds off three hours in Henry VIII's hunting ground with classic diva timing.
Reed buntings, willow warblers, redpolls, chiffchaffs, meadow pipits, skylarks, stonechats, a pair of stunning little mandarin ducks, three kestrels and a hobby don't come near my allotment at Old Palace Lane, though, so next day I had to make do with a couple of robins for company, who flew in and out of the hole in the fruit cage with consummate artistry. I yanked up a couple of tubs' worth of hairy bittercress and a batch of dandelions and planted gooseberry Pax and blackcurrant Ebony in their place. And I pulled some rhubarb, to be stewed with sugar, ginger and a cinnamon stick for the freezer - perfect for syllabubs.
My peas are showing no sign of germinating so I stuck in some mangetout from the garden centre. It's sort of cheating but the alternative - being pealess - is fractionally more undesirable. My broad beans are about four inches high, onions and garlic are growing well, and radishes, chard and beetroot have reached that fragile stage where bored foxes like to roll on them, causing terminal damage.
I don't know how to entertain the foxes to stop them trashing my veg beds. They don't read or play computer games but I thought I might try music and string up some old CDs for them to spin.
Then I'll get Max Clifford on board to make their fortune. Before you can say "eye to the main chance" they'll have sold their story, packed their bags and gone to live somewhere cool - Shoreditch or Clerkenwell, perhaps. Anywhere but Richmond Park.
