When blackbirds fight back

'Err, I don't know how to get down.'

It’s all well and good watching vultures tear a distinctly deceased rabbit apart when there’s the safety of a nice, substantial wire fence between you and them, and being able to observe that the old cliché about nature being red in tooth and claw is true.

But such bloodiness is hardly limited to zoos. And here, in little old Hackney, there’s been a fair bit of it in recent days.

The periphery of the carpark has been, for the last week or so, an avian maternity ward.

Never before have there been so many bird families nursing young and watching over them as they fledge – it’s almost like the flats themselves: more obvious results of human fecundity than ever before.

But for cats, the presence of all these birds is like having Christmas, Easter, summer holidays and birthdays all arrive at once.

Back around 2006, when Boudi was about two and a half, and Mack and Trickie were still alive, we were all out in the garden one day, under a rather pallid sky.

The garden in those days was less patio and more just mess, overgrown with various short-lived and halfhearted efforts at anything resembling the horticultural arts.

The older cats were slumbering when, all of a sudden, Boudi jumped up at the rose bush and just as rapidly, dived in the direction of the flat, with something clearly in her mouth.

The Other Half grabbed her by the scruff and made her drop a small bird, then hoiked her inside and shut the door on her juvenile objections.

As the bird made to totter into a bush, Trickie came out of her reverie and realised that prey was around.

She was duly tossed inside too, to be rapidly followed by Mack, who, at around 14, had been the last to spot what was going on, and had started to slink toward the feathered abductee with a glint in his eye.

The Other Half, being rather more used to this sort of thing, said it was probably on its last legs and I’d need to put it out of its misery.

Great.

I got a spade, but it had no desire for a quick end, and instead kept hopping away in a manner that suggested that it was far from in agreement with his diagnosis.

After a few minutes, I decided to leave it – not least since I was, by then, being divebombed by a very angry robin.

Once inside, with the cats all complaining, the same robin took up a position atop the rotary drier and continued to ‘bark’ out a warning for the next hours.

In the meantime, other adult robins swooped in to help coax the fledgling first onto a chair, then onto the little table and from there into the thick pyracantha right next to it.

And then, until nightfall, they flew back and forth taking it food.

In the morning, they’d all gone, so presumably, the fledgling had regained its strength back and learned how to fly instead of simply falling conveniently within jaw range of a cat.

It was an extraordinary example of a family working to save their little one.

And that was the last time that we had any sort of bird incident.

Before that, there’d just been one occasion when Mack and his sister Mabel had ‘found’ a small bird and brought it into the flat, causing the feather to fly rather more than metaphorically.

That had been my first encounter with such an event and I had been all rather desperate and girly about it.

A certain more realistic steeliness had set in by the time we rescued the robin fledgling.

And that was that on the bird front – until last weekend.

Then, while we all sitting in the Sunday afternoon sun, as though summer had landed all of a sudden, Loki bombed in through the open gate and straight into the flat.

I got inside to find her in the hall with a small bird on the floor in front of her.

Boudi had materialised from somewhere and was reaching out a careful paw to see if it still moved.

We shooed them away and carefully picked it up and took it back outside.

It was breathing heavily but with no obvious signs of external injury. So The Other Half placed it in bushes and we hauled the pride inside, to the predictable objections.

It was only then that I realised that the noise of birds, which has been quite loud of late anyway, had been particularly frantic at that stage.

We checked later and the bird was gone. So, we allowed ourselves to think, another happy ending.

Unfortunately, just 24 hours later, it was Otto’s turn to race into the garden and behind a large pot. We went to see what she was up to and she shot into the flat, to be scragged quickly by The Other Half, who made her drop her prize.

It’s impossible to know for certain that it was the same bird, but it did look so – a sparrow fledgling. And this time it was most certainly deceased.

There were drops of blood on the paving stones – hardly surprising, given that Otto’s canines are so long that I half suspect she’s actually a Dracula cat.

We disposed safely of the bird and kept them in for the rest of the day, while the noise outside continued.

Since then, though, the weather and my illness meant that, until this weekend, the girls haven’t been outside.

Not that all this is remotely as one-sided as you might imagine.

Mr and Mrs Blackbird were, only a year since, squawking away in juvenile joy from the lithe silver birches in the carpark, and are now quite clearly a family unit.

No baby has been spotted, but Mr B has been seen rooting worms from the potager – and hectoring any cat (or human) who comes ‘too close’. Like some of our more colourful ’ackney residents, he was giving it large to all and sundry.

And in the week’s most extraordinary moment, he chased off Reggie, who had only reggiecide on his feline mind, dive-bombing the big ginger cat until he fled through the carpark gates.

So this weekend, whenever they’ve been out, we’ve been extra attentive, listening for any sound of avian anger.

Mind, Loki is clearly working to convince me that nominative determinism really exists.

It’s only just over a week since she managed to get up onto the balcony of the flat above ours – my back was briefly turned so I can only speculate on how she did it.

Once up there, the sense of accomplishment was soon replaced by another feeling.

“Loki, come down!”

“I don’t know how to!”

“Well … how did you get up there in the first place?”

“I can’t remember! I’m stuck!”

She paced rather frantically from one side of the small balcony to the other, meeping in an increasingly paniced way, before suddenly deciding that she could simply jump straight down, landing perfectly lightly, and then making her way into the flat as though nothing untoward had happened.

Yesterday, I found her on top of the canopy that stands next to one of the rear communal entrances, trying to see if she could see any birds in a tree next to it.

But hopefully, a rather quieter weekend is the sign that the fledglings have all fledged or perished in the attempt.

Before I sign off, Boudi wishes me, in the interests of balance, to point out that, a year or so after the robin affair, she actually caught three mice in the flat, over the course of a week or so, and left each one dead, but still in one piece, on the doormat so that, when we got home, we would be sure to find them.

The feline hunting instinct isn’t always a negative thing to be tempered as much as possible.

All up to scratch

One of the delights of coming to work each morning – and there are plenty – is finding out what has been delivered for you that day.

The problem, you see, is that if anything is due to be delivered to your home by a company other than Royal Mail, and you’re not in but they won’t deliver outside of work hours or only for lots of extra money at weekends, then it can be a nightmare to collect it (particularly if you don’t have a car) or have it delivered at a time that actually suits you.

People might complain about the postal service, but it is a service and it's a great deal easier to deal with and more geared to customer satisfaction than certain private delivery companies that I could name, which most certainly do not work on the basis that the provision of a service is paramount.

Thus the easiest thing is often to have things delivered to work, in the knowledge that you can guarantee that someone will be able to sign for whatever it is.

Today, that meant a rather large – and heavy – box containing a swanky new cat scratching post.

The old one had done sterling service for around 10 years, but when its very aim is to be scratched, it isn’t going to last for ever. It was tatty enough as it was when, on Saturday morning, as The Other Half and I reclined in bed, drinking coffee and with me contemplating the weekend’s fodder, a loud crash was heard from next door in the living room, speedily followed by two kittens racing into the bedroom.

Otto in particular was looking back though the doorway with that famous feline expression that combines total surprise with a slightly shifty: ‘it woz nuffink to do wiv me, Guv’, which always provides a quick indicator of just exactly who it was to do with.

A visit to the living room quickly revealed the problem: a glass bowl, which had been sitting quietly on top of one of our lower book shelves, minding its own business, for some years, holding white gravel, sand and some long-dead cacti, was now on the floor, having clearly decided to commit harikari – out of boredom, one assumes.

The glass was unbroken, but the contents were everywhere – not least, all over the scratching post, which stood below it. Tidying up later, it became obvious that this was going to be the least easy thing to clean up, simply because most of the material on the bases was long since rather ragged and the dirt had got under it and into the carpet itself.

After thinking about replacing it for some months, but doing nothing about it, it seems that Otto had decided to force our hand by taking matters into her own paws.

We dismantled the thing, threw it out and then trawled the net for a replacement. And so here it is.

The timing is rather good too: two weeks on Thursday, the kittens will be a year old. So it’s an early birthday present.

It remains to be seen whether Boudi deigns to be interested in it – it hasn’t been high on her agenda since the kittens discovered it, just a matter of a couple of days after their arrival last December.

Loki and Otto thoroughly enjoyed the old one, playing on it (and playing with the little ball that hung from it), fighting on and around it and sleeping on it (and in a 'furry' tunnel that hung from part of it). Scratching posts are far more than just a post for scratching – they're combined gym and entertainment centres for cats.

I admit that I am looking forward to seeing their response to the new one: how long will it take before one or other of them masters the little ladder? Will they clamber through the hole in the middle? Will they like the fact that it's apparently impregnated with catnip?

Ummm. Catnip. Or cat drugs, as we know them. Not all cats respond to catnip and they usually have to be over six months of age before they respond.

Mack adored the stuff and would go completely bonkers for it. His sister, Mabel, was never remotely as interested and neither was Trickie, who followed her. We brought some home from the Columbia Road flower market once – six plants to put into the garden. Before we'd even got the garden door open, Mack had hurled himself into the bag and was rolling madly all over them. Amazingly, they survived that and recovered once they'd been planted out.

Apparently catnip is the only drug known that has two opposite effects, depending on how it's consumed. Sniff it, and cats get a high. Eat it, and the opposite happens.

When we open the box tonight, we shall find out just what they all think.