Fashion-Conscious Fat Birds

We’ve got loads of fat birds in our garden. They spend their mornings cheerfully yomping the contents of the string bags full of assorted seeds embedded in beef tallow that we suspend from a convenient hook, and when these run out they hop gaily round the place plucking worms out of the recently tilled ground. (For clarity, these “fat birds” are of the feathered variety, not the more rotund examples of the young ladyfolk of rural Wiltshire.)

They now seem to associate our house as the location for some kind of daily orgiastic seedy banquet, which is a bit worrying as we’re shortly to lay a lawn, (eschewing the jigsaw patterning of turf in favour of scattering boxes of grass seed cos it’s infinitely cheaper). As such, we’re understandably keen to prevent flocks of the little bastards from scromfing what we throw down before it’s had a chance to grow.

We’ve discussed the idea of erecting a scarecrow, dressed in a strategic selection of my old clothes to act as a sufficient deterrent (which wouldn’t be the first time my clothes have had that effect on birds):
“Eeurgh, there’s a bloke standing in the garden dressed in corduroy combat trousers and a pseudo-kids’-TV-presenter jumper [two of my wonderwife’s least favourite items and long since consigned to Wardrobe 101]. Let’s go next door and decimate his veg patch instead.”