Predator

There's a flash of blurred colour; it hovers for the briefest moment and then, in an instant, it is perched and probing jerkily into the feeder outside the window.  It is a goldfinch.  I don't think they are rare, there's plenty in it garden, at any rate, but they are very exotic- a really out of place bird amongst the gentle pastel colours of an English country garden.

It's head is constantly moving like a piston, in and out of the feeder, out to either side, twisting round to look behind, on constant lookout for predators and they are always about: Cats.  Domesticated predators; savages. Mauling their victims, toying with them,  dismembering them, as if for sport, rarely for food.  I don't often see them as they slink through then along the hedgerow, undulating in and out of the foliage, at the hint of detection creating a lean statuette and then moving on placing their paws gingerly and neatly keeping their eyes riveted on the vulnerable creature fluting from branch to branch.  It might dip and lunge ending in a fluffy of feathers and a corpse on the ground but, today, the goldfinch is lucky, I am there to stand guard against our common enemy.




Time up.
Inspiration: my garden.