For Two Jays I could steam open the Big Birdwatch envelope

I mean how accurate is the survey anyway? What about its integrity? What about my integrity? Would my misinformation skew the results for DA11? Or just 0SP?

It's not as if I'm proposing to include the heron (pictured) in my results. It is plain to see that it comes close enough to the definition of a near neighbour to be mentioned in my dispatches, though admittedly not in the year let alone the hour of my discontent.

Two long tailed tits did grace us with their presence within the chosen hour but the Jays which are in fact a more common sight turned up a day late. The wonderful missus who has more integrity in her little finger than I do in my what until a recent collar bone break was a bowling arm refuses to put out peanuts as bird food arguing that they are an important source of protein for the poor in Southern India.

I cannot check the veracity of the peanut source as we do not have any packets in the house for reference. I might have to ask Simon Barnes or the RSPB as to the voracity of the birds in question for peanuts.

The RSPB asked whether we see other animals such as badgers or grass snakes etc. in our gardens (though foxes are not included in the etcetera). Only the grey squirrel like our rather elderly dog who's just crapped on the Sky+ box got a tick from our garden.

So besides, not in descending order, the half dozen house sparrows, four pigeons, four blue tits, three starlings, two blackbirds, two collared doves, and two magpies in our pear tree (honest), there would be no mention of the reliable robin. Another victim of the collar bone break as I could have been out winter digging fetching up a feast of worms and frightening off the other species, the like of which possibly distorted last year's data.

Eagle eyed twitchers would have sussed me out if I'd included the waxwings (pictured) as they appeared in a previous blog around March 2013.

I would have been far from wise to have included the owl (pictured) which I use as a bird scarer to further skew the 0SP figures. Furthermore I was not outside tucking in to one of my turn her hand to anything wife's homemade Cornish pasties to include the dozen seagulls that flew overhead during the hour long survey which according to Natures Boldest Thieves on BBC One last night would have descended in order to relieve me of my treat. Thank goodness the programme didn't include starry gazy pie for bait as St Ives Harbour would have been a sight for sore eyes at low tide looking like one of those landfill sites.

Notice how calm I was when I mentioned the dog's mess which usually gets a bad press when it is stepped on. Actually it was the omnipresent missus who found it. It wasn't just because I thought she had stated the obvious in saying 'There's crap on the telly' that I didn't react.

I’ve seen naturalists orgasm as they pulled apart badger crap. I’ve been on field trips where the guide has tried to persuade us of the significance to the universe of cow pats. My mum used to go out on the main road with a spade to collect the ‘manure’ that the milkman’s horse used to leave on the road while it was still steaming. Even modern day TV gardeners wax lyrical about it.

I own a T-shirt with all the various bird droppings emblazoned across it. I’ve heard people celebrate their good fortune when a seagull crapped all over them. In contrast, people of the same persuasion go bonkers if they step on some dog shit while walking on a coastal path in Cornwall even though they are guana white with bird shit. They threaten all sorts, though they always claim their bile is directed towards the owners rather than the dogs themselves. I’m not so sure.

At a wildlife centre near Tonbridge they had badgers. People used to moan about the pungent smell of their shit but to my knowledge the owner never got a single letter about their droppings. Their smell could be a sort of defence mechanism. Crows and magpies usually don’t go near dead badgers that have been knocked over by fast drivers. It’s not the best sort of defence mechanism I agree, as it seems the badger needs to be dead before it comes into play.

Because of the desperate smell of their crap, the owner of the wildlife centre used to study the stomach contents of the badgers to investigate their feeding habits. He would set up a tape recorder by their sets at night to play Des O’Connor tapes, returning in the morning to pick through what the badgers had thrown up.


My mate’s grandfather was a Cornish miner. The seagulls used to drive them crazy when they came up to the surface at dinner time to eat their pasties. So my mate says, his granddad used to alternate throwing a bit of pasty up to the most annoying seagull with a piece of carbide which was used to fuel his miners’ lamp.

Water drips onto the lump of calcium carbide which then gives off the inflammable gas acetylene for the lamp to function. If water did that, you could imagine the effect of the stomach contents of the gull on the stuff. According to my mate the unfortunate seagull got about 20 yards away before it exploded. The other gulls got the message drekkly and went off to annoy the emmets.

As Lucy Cooke's equally rigorous experiments have shown, over the years the gulls have developed a taste for cream teas, Cornish ice cream and pretend home made pasties. I hear that they are plaguing the coronary unit of Treliske Hospital at Truro these days. That's the price of ignoring flotsam and jetsam me ansome.