Watch the Birdie

With our Indian Summer now blazing away, there is a lot of Peregrine Falcon activity going on here in Jane Austen Land - these pictures were taken from our kitchen window about 20 minutes ago. It must be humiliating for the fastest creature on earth to have to share the same perch as a chicken, but he doesn't seem to mind...

... or does he? He looks pretty pissed-off to me.

Peregrines do not eat their immediate neighbors whilst they are breeding and feeding the chicks - they fly a mile or so away from the nest to pick off pigeons, blackbirds, starlings, etc., so as to keep unwanted attention away from their offspring. Since they can move at about 200 MPH, this is no great inconvenience for them, and they are back within a trice. They will kill about 3 birds each a day during the nesting season, which is why they are so unpopular amongst the Grouse-breeders of Highland Scotland.

Now that their offspring are fully grown, however, they are not so fastidious, and the congregation of our local Catholic church (where their nest-box has been set up for the last few years) are treated to a display of skymanship pretty much every morning just after the 10.00 a.m. Mass, as they casually swoop on a pigeon about 30 feet beneath them, not bothering to kill it outright before taking it back up to the scrape for breakfast. It's a pretty noisy affair.

I know this because one of my recent German guests also happens to be a converted Catholic (God knows why - literally) and witnessed this event when he left the church on wednesday morning. He said the the throng watching it from below broke out in spontaneous applause when the prey was snatched - not very Christian you would have thought, but pigeons are not very popular in Bath. I happened to be at the Royal Mail depot next to St. John's when the pigeon got got and heard it all, but did not see a thing.

The Catholic German is also the gay one, and has been a keen bird-watcher all his life. He has gone through many transitional stages including Marxist-Leninist since he was a teenager, and seems to have finally settled on Catholicism as the place to position himself for the best chance of a decent afterlife, especially since his state pension is going to fall well short of acceptable, and he is now in his late 50s. The one thing that has remained constant in his chameleon-like changes of colour is his interest in things with feathers that can fly, so the Peregrines have caught his wrapt attention during the stay in our compact but adorable city apartment, being even rarer in Germany than they are here.

The four of us were sitting in the kitchen the other night discussing the falcons, when I told them that the Church of England spire (seen in the photos) that they perched on was not the one used for nesting in the mating season, because a box had been placed on the tower of the nearby Catholic church for them to mate and breed.

Our good and mutual friend the dentist (and atheist) German said, "That's what Catholics are for."