karma

It is early morning, the snow has all but gone, replaced by a gentle dull drizzle and drifting grey coloured mist. The brightness and clarity of the last few days has dissolved into the more usual leaden hues of a northern winter.  Everything is coated in a fine mizzle with jewel like droplets at the end of each branch. And it feels cold.

There is a whirling flash of wings flying back and forth past the bedroom window. 

The starlings are back. 

Our neighbour's bathroom roof has a conveniently starling size gap beneath the slate tiles and the millstone grit stones. It used to be inhabited by a garrulous family of house sparrows until the starlings in a rather nasty take over bid killed all the fledgelings and hounded the adults. It took nearly nine years before the sparrows returned to our garden.....

I digress. The present incumbents - the starlings, have raised between two and three broods every year for over a decade now and seeing that in the wild, starlings live between three and five years, it does mean several generations have passed beneath those slate slabs.

After the flurry of raising fledglings until the last minutes of summer, the starlings suddenly vanish, turning from parents to small dots within those magical murmurations. Then, as autumn begins to soften then decay, they return. They (are 'they' the same birds from summer? without ring ID - who knows?) return and begin prospecting, researching nest sites for the coming spring. 

Winter comes and goes, or lingers depending on her mood however the starlings have a fixed schedule and for the last three or four days the birds have been flitting in and out, squeezing below the snow melt to investigate their potential nesting spot for 2025.

The roof space above the neighbour's bathroom must be filled to the rafters with decades of nesting material. The previous owner, an older lady who although she owned the house for around ten years only really lived in it for about four as she suffered ill health. She was quite happy that the birds lived in her roof saying she was more their landlord that the owner resident herself. There are now new owners, a young couple who have been rebuilding the entire house for the last 18 (very long and dusty and noisy) months who I made aware of 'our' starlings in their roof and until today I thought the birds would be safe for another season. 

Today I heard work starting in the bathroom. I might gently remind them about the birds in the roof or suggest to the starlings that their residency, like the house sparrows they evicted, has now too come to an end.