Boules And Birds

Boules And Birds
We have had a fortnight of sunny days, which has meant plenty of afternoons to play boules. The problem has been the starting time. The sun has heat in it from around 11.00 in the morning to just after 4.00 in the afternoon but boules never starts before 3.00. Why? The sacred provencal lunch hour(s). No way is anyone going to start before 2.00 and a slightly less sacred but nonetheless standard observance is for an hour's siesta after lunch. So 3.00 it is, at the earliest. We'll play typically for an hour and a half or two hours and the problem then is that it is starting to get noticeably cold by the time we start the final game. I have tentatively suggested starting earlier but the idea is clearly a non-starter. The problem disappears as the days get longer and, in the summer, we don't start before 4.00, to avoid the heat, but in the meantime I take a jacket to put on for the final game.

I had lunch today at Font Fresque, Steve and Jo's place, and we watching the birds flocking around the feeders that Jo had filled before lunch. There were bramblings sparrows, nuthatches and a wide variety of finches and tits. For some reason it occurred to me that I had not noticed any small nests by the wayside, which should be visible now that the bushes were all bare. The only nests I had noticed were large ones, high in the trees, probably belonging to magpies or jays.

I remembered that when I was a kid, living in Chiddingfold just after the war, my schoolfriends and I could always spot where birds would be nesting. It was a standard game, on the way back from school, to spot a thick holly tree and bet there was a song thrush's or blackbird's nest in it; or we'd go past a hawthorn hedge and bet whether there was a nest of a hedge sparrow, yellow hammer or chaffinch in it. And we'd invariably guess correctly. I remember once spending hours with a friend trying to find a skylark's nest, having seen it plummet down into a field. We knew it would never land close by its nest but would run along the ground to it, which would always be in the ground. The nest could not be that far from where it landed but, however hard we searched, we couldn't find it. I've lost a lot of the country lore I knew then, but I digress.

The question in my mind was: where were all these small birds nesting? Only then did it occur to me that there are virtually no hedges in my area (no holly trees either that I know of). Steve came up with obvious answer. Small birds will find any nook or cranny to build a nest and there are lots of abandoned “cabanons”, the small stone huts that agricultural workers used to use to house their tools (and occasionally animals and themselves overnight) in the fields around. There are also many stone walls and crumbling outbuildings which would afford plenty of opportunities for birds. Birds, like human beings in the past, simply use whatever is to hand.