A one-metre length of concrete garden edging lies at the foot of a brick wall in our garden flush against the bricks for about 750mm with a 20mm gap at one end narrowing
to a few millimetres about a quarter of the way along. At 10:00 AM today I found a male Common Staling trapped by his head. He must have been pecking at something between the edging and the wall while moving along to his left in pursuit of whatever it was
until he’d reached a place where the gap had narrowed to a point where he could no longer withdraw his head.
I reached down and grasped the struggling fool, moving him towards a widening of the gap so I could pull him free without ripping his head off, although that option was
lurking in the machaevalean badlands of my mind. He acknowledged my compassion by decorating my Levis with a hefty squirt of poop, so I hurled the base brute skywards and he absquatulated with FA-18 alacrity, disappearing within a couple of seconds. A staccato
popping carried back to me, probably the Sturnidae rendition of a sonic boom.
John Layton
Holt.
