Demented blackbird

could be worse Katek could be a cockerel

We have the same thing in our garden, they have a nest in the hedge at the bottom. We can hear it from every room in the house and it goes on for hours.

Oh help....no! And they talk about the peace and quiet of the countryside.......!!

emmasnan-we have quite a dense shrubbery at the bottom of the garden so think the nest is there. We even brought in the peacefully sleeping cat in case it was disturbing the bird. Made no difference apart from the cat staring balefully at us from beside the locked cat flap!

It's its young fledgelings. Total nervous breakdown as they leave the nest. Adults see danger everywhere. Rather like some human parents. And just like humans the young ignore their parents!

We had a shouty blackbird earlier this year. It always perched itself on the chimney pot so its racket was amplified into our sitting room like a foghorn!

We have that all the time at the moment along with noisy 'teenage' gold crests, swifts and housmartins and swallows. Sitting in the garden at the moment is noisy but a delight!

whitewave - what you were saying about the fledglings reminded me of an incident my DD and I witnessed in early summer last year. There are a lot of magpies nesting near where we live. One morning,a fledgling magpie flew into our glass balcony door and temporarily stunned itself. While my DD and I were wondering what to do,as it sat there looking a bit bewildered 2 adult magpies,presumably its parents,flew down,and started pecking and squawking at it. One of them was even jumping up and down on the poor thing! Thankfully this did the trick and a few minutes later it flew off with them. I had never realised that magpies were such conscientious parents!

I have chickens and a cockerel in the gardening backing onto mine, I get a Dawn chorus daily! Luckily my bedroom is at the front so it doesn't always disturb me ?

We have magpies who have taken to banging on the kitchen window with their beaks. No idea why !

We have workman banging and whistle about theirs scaffolding up around our apartments having some work done.

I have velux windows in my bedroom. Jackdaws walk across them looking for insects under the moss on the roof. The thing I don't like about the wildlife outside is the young bats. I have a maternity colony of pipistrelles in my roof, and at this time of year the young are being taught to hunt. I have to close the upstairs windows before dusk as they sometimes take a wrong turning and end up in the bedrooms or the bathroom. When it's warm the bedrooms are suffocating, but I don't want baby bats in the house.

There must be a fledgling or two in the bushes and they are warning cats and foxes off. We had that every year for a few week a year in the UK.

Hildajenni, why don't you have fly/bug screens fitted? You can get cheap ones that you velcro on- but then it's a nightmare to open and close windows-velux. We had some proper ones fitted on runners so you can easily open and close them. We live near lots of farms, cows and horses- so it's a blessing to stop flies coming in.

I much rather listen to the sounds from a Blackbird than the sound from my neighbours alarm which goes off on a regular basis for no apparent reason always about 10mins after he has left for work,I was under the impression that they went off after so long but this one doesn't,I did't rather listen to the birds any morning.

Like Hildajenni we have problems with pipistrelles, only they come down the chimney. I think they have a summer roost there. The first year it happened we ended up with our alarm going off while we were away. The neighbour with the key couldn't find anything ( the bats were roosting in the curtains) and when we gut it home, we had two dead ones and one barely alive. I fed the survivor(Bartie) on mealworms for three days and let him go in the dusk.
I like to think it's him when they swoop round the house at night!

to you gillyknits What a lovely lady you are for looking after the surviving bat-let. I hope that Bartie is amongst the bats that fly around your home at dusk.

I was in Durham at lunchtime and was excited to come across a thrush and it stayed for minutes completely unafraid. The last time I saw a thrush was in France two years ago. They used to be common garden birds when I was a child.

Our baby seagull is growing like mad, but has had every weather possible thrown at him - torrential rain, high winds and now extremely hot sun. He's sat up on the roof gaping.

We had loads of thrushes in our garden in Leics - and blackbirds, and so many other birds too. So I am surprised you haven't seen one for so long. Here we have loads of fieldfares- same family, but noisy rather than 'singy'.

We hear pigeons in the chimney, not sure if it`s echoing from the chimney top, or if they actually come down the chimney, but they sound to be right behind the fire back, day in, day out.

Good variety of birds here, but there are times when I could cheerfully strangle that damn collared dove that sits in the tree opposite the bedroom window!

Those birds have a monotonous call at the best of times, but this one always sounds annoyingly hesitant and just slightly off key!

Definitely fledgling time here, but I love seeing the families of birds in the bird baths

I have had exactly the same problem. I know where the nest is, in the hedge just outside, and the two cats that set them off, like to sit on the front doorstep in the sun. So it's bedlam all day. And I mean all day. From first light they started, right up to sunset. The blooming birds were utterly neurotic. Gave their alarm call with a full beak of grubs too. It even took to perching on top the car, crapping all over it when ever possible. I felt like I wanted to shoot the birds......or the cats.......didn't really care which! Of course I didn't before anyone gets upset! But, marginally before it drove me mad.....the baby birds fledged! Peace at last. And next year, I won't be living her, so it won't be my problem!

Not seen any thrushes here for at least a couple of years, nor greenfinches either and we used to see loads of them.