The two men were debating just how many the birds were, as they snatched food from the feeders before them. Birds? They behaved more like a swarm of midges in summer: up, down, sideways, weaving their strange patterns, so that if you followed one with your eyes you were missing out on 10 beside them. One of the men claimed to have counted 40, the other said 50. And as these birds were predominantly tits just then, predominately coal tits, their speed of in-and-out was phenomenal. The sensible thing to do, of course, the observers told themselves afterwards would have been to fetch the camera. That would fix the minute once and for all. They didn't think of it.
Now, these birds were feeding from four devices or contraptions. One, a home-made thing, could take up to three pounds of peanuts. Then there was a long feeder with four openings and perches, filled with sunflower seeds. Number 3 was the normal wire peanut feeder and the fourth was a cage the smaller birds could get in and out of, carrying some fat. This was about noon less than a week ago. You can guess what the traffic would be like as the darkness began to fall. For them comes the last frenzied urge to fill up for the night. And it is frenzied, for, we are told by experts that in cold winter weather a bird may not go to roost for the night until it has packed in enough food to carry it through the long, cold hours.
So much do small birds live at the edge of starvation, that a woman who feeds them in a secluded suburban garden - two walls of which are formed by the house, the other two by walls 12 feet high, while there are also warm bushes at hand - swears she lost 60 per cent of her regulars after one day of heavy rain and storm-force winds. You may say that they perhaps just moved on to another garden. Not likely - from a sheltered place where they are fed regularly and copiously?
The cynic may wonder aloud how birds got on before artificial feeders became general. One answer is that in other days there were more hedgerows, more cover, more places to find insects or berries or other fodder. Now towns creep out with burgeoning suburbs which eat up hedges as much as modernising farmers do. Green fields are lost to tarmacadamed roads. And then, the deadly pesticides which kill the insect prey of the birds are new. Mooney Going Wild, on Sunday after the one o'clock news, is now to run a series on small birds. Worth listening to.