At least 4 pairs of Blackbirds visit our garden during the breeding season, even though none of them are actually nesting in the garden. Currently they’re all busy collecting any dry grasses and other vegetation in order to construct their nests. When the seasonal urge is upon them, they seem to lose any grip on reality (assuming that they have one in the first place that is). This morning, one particularly over-enthusiastic female blackbird was in our allotment trying to remove a branch that must have been several times her own bodyweight, never mind long enough to grace the nest of a buzzard. Nearly five minutes elapsed before she accepted the inevitable, flew onto our extension roof and took a beakful of moss instead. Jackdaws and rooks all seem to be flying around carrying sticks. Sarah grew up in a house with nesting jackdaws and recalls the time she was off school and one fell down the chimney and made an eerie, child-terrifying, scraping sound behind the fire. Woodpigeons and collared doves are spending more and more time in last year’s nest tree; a tree which has hosted woodpigeon, collared dove, blackbird, song thrush, greenfinch, goldfinch, chaffinch as well as robin, dunnock and wren in it’s lower recesses. How soon until we see the first of this year’s additions?