While pottering around the garden I came across a sad sight. A young male blackbird had, at some prior time, somehow caught its leg in the mesh of a fence and had, it would appear, spent some time stuggling by the time I found it, dead.
Sad in itself. But what made the discovery more intriguing was that there was another, second, young male blackbird - perfectly alive - in absorbed attendance beside the body of the dead bird. It seemed to be almost magnetically attracted to the corpse. In what appeared to be a considered manner, it would hop up to the dead bird and gently touched its beak with its own before moving away a few feet and repeating the gesture time after time.
Over the course of the day - from early morning to late afternoon - the bird never strayed far from the dead bird. I was only when I removed the dead bird and buried it that the other bird moved away any distance. Over the course of the following days and weeks I've seen the second blackbird in the garden almost every day and rarely far from the spot where the dead bird met its untimely end.
Comments
:o(
That is both beautiful and very sad.
Thank you for sharing. Nature is so intriguing.
Peta