This is a picture of a young goldfinch. He was resting on my garden wall and he had simply run out of energy. His head is tucked under his wing and, though his breast rose and fell from his breathing, he made no reaction art all when i nudged him to see if he would fly off. I’ve had a feeding station at the end of my garden for the last couple of years, and up to 10 goldfinches would gather to feed on niger seed on a regular basis (the black dots that you can see stuck to the bird’s feathers in the picture above are bits of niger seeds). When a nest of goldfinches fledged, their parents naturally gathered around my feeding station. Alas, most of them did not survive. Some fell prey to neighbourhood cats – I rescued one (literally) from the jaws of a cat. Leaving the chick (who seemed stunned but otherwise uninjured) on the flat roof of our studio, he was swiped within a couple of minutes by a marauding jackdaw. Some just can’t summon the energy to feed and roost – I’ve found a few chicks dead in the garden that don’t seem to have been injured by a predator.
I didn’t give the chick pictured above much chance of survival – the boundary walls of my back garden serve as trunk routes for the local cat population.. Sure enough, when I returned to check on him about five minutes after I took the picture above, he was gone. In his place was one of the neighbourhood cats, looking contented.