Duncan Diary Instalment 9 – Spring in the Country!

I have two cats. One black, one white, and like all cats they are completely beautiful. They are also completely stupid. But they have value beyond the aesthetic and the intellectual. They are a living lesson on how to be an old married couple. They sleep together (but far enough apart that they’re not actually touching), occasionally lick one another, go out and come in together, eat the same food and squabble every hour they are awake. They are inseparable – they even shop together, which for country cats means finding mice in the barn, in the long grass and in the woodshed. They do this together, and having found them they bring them home together, little brown mice, big grey mice, even bigger voles and sometimes (when they’re on special) garter snakes. They bring them in through the cat door, drop them at my feet, then sit back and look as proud as teenagers with a first car.

And then they do nothing. Nothing at all. The mouse runs under the stove, or the fridge, or up in the bookshelves, and the cats spend the next ten minutes looking puzzled, like children at their first magic show: “There was a mouse, now there’s no mouse, where’s it gone?” Kids figure things out eventually (“It’s up your sleeve “) but my cats don’t. Or can’t.

They go from puzzled to impatient. They seem to think that if either or both of them stares fixedly at the place where the mouse was, that it will suddenly reappear. One mouse ran down a hot air vent heat just before supper. Both cats slept all night with their noses by the vent, and were still there at lunchtime. Still puzzled.

Its springtime. And springtime in the country is a sexy business. Cats, donkeys, sheep, llamas, snowdrops, daffodils, frogs, cows, birds, and hazelnut trees, they’re all hard at it, reproducing as fast as they can outside every window in the house. The first of the barn swallows are sussing out the nests from last year, collecting mud and bits of donkey hair to make repairs, looking for the one hole in the eaves of the house that I haven’t plugged, the same hole as they’ve used as long as I’ve been here. The cats sit and watch the hole, they can’t reach it and they know they can’t reach it but they hope that one day in early summer, when the beaks of the baby swallows crowd the hole, waiting for the mosquitoes that Mum and Dad bring back every five minutes of every day, they (the cats) hope that maybe, (just maybe) one of those little birds will forget how to fly and drop to the ground. Just maybe.

The hummingbirds are back. The little ones, the Calliope hummingbirds, come all the way from their winter in the Gulf of Mexico, are little fragile birds who burn so much energy that they need to eat every five minutes. Yet somehow, one day in fall, they’ll all take off and somehow manage a two thousand mile journey packing only their memories of where (and exactly where) they made their homes last summer.

One of my neighbours has a theory that they hitch-hike. “They burrow in to the down on geese” he says “all that soft fluffy stuff under the feathers” and he claims that they then hibernate, the goose takes off for it’s trip South, “and when they get to a warm sunny place they wake up, crawl out, and start being humming birds all over again”. He reckons that one of the reasons a lot of geese stay in Canada for the winter is that they’re “tired of packing all them freeloading liddle bastids along!”

And my woodpecker is back. Just like last year. Pecking. There are lots of dead tree stumps and lots of nice powerline poles, which everybody else’s woodpeckers peck at and dig bugs out of. But not my woodpecker. He sits on the top bar of the orchard gate and from dawn to dusk he hammers away like a five year old with a drum kit for Christmas, bang bang bang bang bang . It’s a metal gate, and the noise, loud enough to wake me (and I’m a deep sleeper) starts exactly at sunrise. My neighbour (the hummingbird man) claims to know all about woodpeckers. “He’s lookin’ for action” he says, “advertising himself as a big strong noisy redhead with a big pecker, bang bang bang.” and then he adds, “But they all catch on eventually.”

Spring in the country ……..