June 1st  2011    Tim Candler

    I don't think My Old Friend raised children last year. I think this because he spent most of his nesting season singing outside my window.  Also I think he must have passed sometime in August.  Probably fell to a Merlin.  His kingdom is now a republic, loud with quarrels and fussing.

    And how much more ordered it used to be when My Old Friend ruled the long days.  He was so smooth in his policing of the vegetable Garden, I never appreciated how hard he must have worked.  Now any Tom, Dick or Harry feels title to a Strawberry and  I have seen Brown Thrashers  amongst the Raspberry.

     It is possible that one year soon his successor will emerge.  Of the current pretenders, one has his nest by the barn, the other just to the north of the domicile.  The Mockingbird by the barn, I will call the Cedar Mockingbird.  The more northerly Mockingbird I will call the Thuja Mockingbird.

      Their Territories are ill-defined, and there is flux because to the east, up from the woodland, where the creek runs, there is a third Mockingbird.  He is ferocious in his ambitions, he is loud and bombastic, and I suspect he has all those qualities of tyrant I so admired in My Old friend.  

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