The noisiest bird EVER has got to be the blackbird currently resident in our garden. She seems to have gone berserk recently. She spends almost the entire day flitting between our apple tree and our pear tree, shouting shrill and very LOUD alarm calls. Occasionally she hops down to the lawn and comes close to our back door, shouting at my husband and me. She's sometimes joined by her mate, but mostly it is just the female. The shouting goes on relentlessly most days, until after sunset.
We do have two cats, but one is totally non-aggressive (which won't impress a blackbird, I know -- to a bird, a cat is a cat, no doubt). The other one hunts, but mainly for small rodents, and almost exclusively at night. She spends 99% of the day sleeping off her night-time adventures and is rarely in the garden during the day.
We assume the hysterical blackbird is protecting a nest nearby (her other main vantage/shouting point is high in a leafy tree in our next-door neighbour's garden; we think the nest might be near that tree). But we are concerned about the length of time she has been doing this (at least the last three weeks) and the apparent lack of stimuli for the behaviour -- ie, she shouts and screams regardless of whether the cats are nearby, or whether we are in the garden -- she will sit in our apple tree and shout whether there is anyone in the garden or not.
I'm wondering whether this is normal behaviour, or whether this hysterical female somehow got "stuck" in vigilant mode and is now permanently on guard. I would have thought that this late in the season young would have been fully fledged and gone away. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
:flyaway:
