Dom Davis (The Blog)

The area at the front of Little Cottage is little more than a gravel drive giving access to the houses past ours. Getting a car up it is impractical so we use our bit to store the bins, hang the washing out, keep pot plants and, recently, somewhere to keep The Zozos bird table.

The bird table is a rather neat arrangement of large bird bath below and bird house and feeding area above made to look like it’s made from greening metal. Since it’s not actually made from metal it’s only really meant for smaller birds and not, say, pterodactyls. In fact the box clearly states “Unsuitable for larger birds, pterodactyls, dragons or other wyrms”¹.

Yesterday the bird table clearly suffered pterodactyl strike (can’t have been a dragon, there’s naff all room for them to manoeuvre and a complete lack of scorch marks) resulting in the loss of a fat ball and serious structural damage. This is not good. Replacing it is not going to be easy either. Clearly the new one will have to be able to withstand extinct creatures but there is also the local environment to consider.

The geography outside the front of our house means that when it’s windy we get serious gusts of wind. Enough to rip washing from lines, blow over clothes horses and knock over fully grown adults¹. Clearly whatever we buy must be stable and easy to fix in place. Which leads me to the next problem.

The gravel drive sits on about 1″ of soil which in turn sits on a substrate of diamond¹ which makes putting fixing things into the ground very hard. I bent all the metal fixing pins on the other bird table trying to drive them into the ground.

Of course, as always, the Internet will prevail and I’m sure we’ll find something suitable.

¹ True story^2
2OK, maybe a little exaggerated