FLEDGING BLUE TITS

Well, that swallowed up some time… Two and a half hours of a Thursday evening to be exact… meaning that, when we did get around to eating, it involved nothing but a swift bowl of cereal forming the main meal of the day.

Ah well…! Perhaps my waistline will forgive me…?

Perhaps I ought to explain…?

Losing that huge chunk of the evening, which we both found kind of surprising, was down to those pesky "Red Button" webcams which I told you about the other day (http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/springwatch-for-breakfast.html). We arrived home from work and switched on the TV, and it was still tuned to the same settings that it had been in the morning, meaning that the webcams were still there, and they were showing the contents of a nesting box containing either eight or nine Blue tit chicks huddled together but, as the captions kept reminding us, on the very brink of fledging.

Sure enough, between the feeds, and the bouts of sudden silence from all the chirruping, every so often one of them would poke its beak out through the little hole and take a good look at the great big wide world beyond, give its wings an experimental flutter, and look pretty much ready to pack its bags and leave home, despite the gathering gloom and chill of a typical spring evening.

Having just sat ourselves down to watch this spectacle "for a few minutes" we found, in the great tradition of those "Big Brother" overnights we've been told about, that two and a half hours had passed, that we were suddenly feeling very sleepy, and those chicks looked as if they were never going to leave as they huddled together closely with all their siblings for what will probably be the last time in their little lives.

Or perhaps they'd been primed so that they would choose the most "media friendly" moment to do it, and schedule it to happen during the evening's live broadcast so that the presenters could gush and coo and look as if they'd planned a special treat especially for us, the humble viewers.

Instead of suffering that, we went to bed, fully expecting to find an empty nest the next morning.

However, at four-thirty the next day (I told you I was an idiot…), I booted up the TV again and found that they were still there although, as it turned out, not for very much longer. As I sat there, tapping away at my emails and so forth, the first one went for it at 5.52am, and I was able to dash upstairs and wake my Beloved so that she got to see the rest of them leave during the next half hour or so.

The last one was a worry, though, given that it looked ad if its wings were not quite ready and, having clung on to the hole for a few moments, partook of a vertical rather than a horizontal launch.

And then they were gone, the fledglings had flown the coop (an expression that always reminds me of Jo Grant leaving "Doctor Who" when I was about nine…), and the nest was left bare (but for the parasites which were left behind), and suddenly all of the excitement turned to melancholy and I began to understand (in a small way) what it must feel like for parents to walk around an empty house when their children have left home.

The natural world… and the natural order of things… You really can't beat it, can you…?

So anyway, now I'm wondering what will become of those little darlings now that they have broken out into the big, bad world. I'll never know, of course, but, for two or three hours, they were little television stars and the very centre of our world.