BOWER BIRD FEEDING IN SPRING:

Male Bowerbird

Thank God it’s rained. Not enough for the season, but enough for this week…. & yet still I’m depressed…Yes, it’s official. The Vegetable Garden has been re-designated the Bower Bird Feeding Zone.

Already this season they have cleaned up all the mixed lettuce, (no colour preferences) & all the other winter greens…except they don’t like Rocket & they don’t like Mizuna…. Hah…take that!

Last year we planted only cherry tomatoes (Black Cherry & Lemon Drop from Diggers). The cherry tomatoes tend to fruit early meaning we can usually get some before the Bowsies get back from their summer holiday in the mountains. But last year, with the better than average rain, many decided to stay on & apparently the tastiness of these two specialist varieties made worthwhile the effort required to fossick around & find these paltry little fruits. Or so I guess, since we got none.

My other plan last year was hot chillies!….Well, hot chillies, red hot chillies & WMDs. These I thought would be left for us. We chose varieties for yield, heat & colour. Our favourite was a little black number with handsome purple/brown leaves. & it is true that we did get some fruit to experiment with early in the season, but the crop hadn’t fully ripened (short season here) by the time the Bowsies got back from hols & started to get experimental themselves. It was just 1 or 2 at first & I vacillated between “Hah! Take that!” & “OMG. What could I have been thinking?!” But in no time they decided they had a liking for chillies & once they did they kept the leaves eaten back so that they could keep an eagle-eye on the ripening fruit (nothing too green, please). I have since found out that birds have very few taste receptors….but I do wonder about their bums!  Apparently it’s all about aroma…that explains why My Fat Hens refuse chook pellets!   

Female/Juvenile

Some “Good Organic Gardeners” of our acquaintance set rat traps baited with crystallised cherries to get rid of  Bower Birds…(apparently the trick is to tie down the trap so that the bird doesn’t fly off with it…it gets expensive replacing those traps all the time. I’m sure their tomatoes taste better than the ones we get from the IGA & ripen on the sunny window above the sink; but to my mind there would always be the taint of dead (& mutilated) Bower Birds in theirs.

So until I can afford a bird cage in the veg patch I guess we’ll just have to eat the things that Bowsies don’t like…Beans & peas (you have to protect the seedlings with chicken-wire cloches)..silver beet, beet root, cucumber, zucchini, basil, parsley.