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The woodpecker jinked across the lawn like an especially cunning partridge. Its goal was a skilfully constructed bird table with wire surrounds, to provide safe feeding for finches, tits, woodpeckers and other small birds, while denying access to corvids, grey squirrels and raptors. A sparrow hawk regularly sweeps across the garden. The ‘sparrow’ element is misleading. This is an avian pocket-battleship, with not a molecule wasted in the pursuit of lethality. Sparrows? I have seen it feasting on a pigeon.

It is a pity that real-life nature offers so little scope for sentimentality. Magpies are handsome creatures, but if you want songbirds, you will need a Larsen trap to control numbers. Cats seem at least as worthy of sentiment as dogs or children. But the domestic moggy is birdsong’s great enemy. Tom Kitten may have grown up fearing rats. The same was unlikely to apply to birds.