The harsh reality of encouraging birds to your garden, particularly if they nest there, is that at this time of year there will be evidence of predation. My garden this year has been no exception; one helpless young bird had fallen, been plucked or pushed from the nest and had died. The picture above shows a reed warbler feeding a young cuckoo, a situation that would lead to the death of any warbler infants in the nest, although an increasingly unlikely eventuality with the crash in cuckoo numbers. I have discovered this year that woodpeckers are carnivorous and will pluck infant birds from the nest, as will magpies, a bird so increased in numbers that it should probably be subject to a formal culling. Fledgling birds are particularly vulnerable, too large to be contained in the nest they often have to waddle about on the ground for a day or two while their wing feathers develop sufficiently for them to be able to fly. One dead one found in the garden had been cleanly decapitated (head missing), the rest of the carcase seemingly untouched. On a recent visit to Hornsea Mere I was told that the larger gulls here feast on the ducklings when first they set out on the water with their parents, ‘the Mere is like a gull’s MacDonalds’.
It’s easy to be saddened by the harshness in Nature, the young having experienced so little of life. Some people are able to nurture abandoned fledglings although not encouraged by the British Trust for Ornithology. The rescue and care for helpless young mammals is the mission of many varied individuals and organisations. At the peak of the ‘help to the young’ table is the care given to infant humans, the success rate being a primary yardstick of national health systems around the World.
Human animals, like gulls and many others, are omnivorous but we have engineered systems whereby meat is available to us throughout the year rather than just at one time of the year.