Our London terrace of houses is backed by another terrace. Between the two are small gardens, mostly paved, and left sterile by renters. So this is not a bird-friendly place. And we both love garden birds.
There are advantages though, one of them being that we get to know our few avian residents, and they us.
There have been times when birds have been plentiful, as when an annual count included 27 house sparrows who ran the place and kept us much amused - until one year when they all left, never to return.
We have trained robins to eat from our knees when we have been in our shed at the bottom of our small garden. Blackbirds have been friendly and filled the surrounding air with glorious song. Goldfinches are commonplace, and local visitors have been wrens, greenfinches, dunnocks, blue tits and great tits.
When there has been a dearth of birds in our vicinity, this seems to have coincided with a plethora of pet cats.
I do everything possible to attract old and new bird friends to our garden, offering food, water, and housing for any who might care to share it with us.
Besides hanging feeders of niger seeds, peanuts and sunflower seeds, there is accommodation aplenty.
High on the back of the house is a sparrow box (just in case), with a tit box at its end, and a concrete house martin's nest attached to it below.
At the same height and a distance away is a box for swifts in an attempt to lure a couple back who lived two doors down but whose nest hole was filled up by builders.
Below the swift box is an odd shaped home for bats, bees, butterflies, and any homeseekers.
Low down, and absolutely cat-proof, is our nest box for great tits. This is used every year with success and sometimes failure. As couples, we know each other well.
Then, nearby, is a robin box. This is a bit too vulnerable as one summer a crow ate all the young from it, and during another summer a great spotted woodpecker did the same.
I have just added a new roof to this box to make it a little more proof against villains. Now, screwed up to the underside of it I have made a nesting home or hibernation place for a bumblebee.
I love bumblebees, despite once being stung on the hand and the poison slowly paralysing my arm up to the shoulder.
This nest haven was made from a small tin, sold with bread yeast. With junior hacksaw and tin cutter, a hole was cut into the side of it, forming a little porch roof. And where the bumblebee might enter over sharp metal, a piece of wood has been glued on as a more comfortable sill.
A paste mixture of glue and compost has been used to fill the gaps and, in a rustic way, made the tin blend in with the box's woodwork. A little dried moss has been inserted for the sake of comfort.
All my bird boxes have been camouflaged roughly to represent the cement and brickwork of the house. For this I have used the wax-based oil paint that I used for my paintings of years ago (I use pastel now). It is resilient to weather and sunlight and has a matt finish.
For years I have had a bell in the garden, the handle of which had rotted away. I gave it a new handle - a long one. It hangs from the vine arbour that spans the garden and is there to be tolled in the frozen winter to tell the birds that they can finish their foraging and come to my garden for the freshly offered food and water.
The bell came in handy when we made noises from the pavement outside our doors to show our gratitude to the overworked men and women tackling the Covid-19 virus.
