Rescue

My wife bellowed, then shot past the window, accelerating so fast that she assumed a reddish tint. I followed her out, and found her standing in front of the gate which guards our neighbour's yard, faced off against our very angry cat. Behind the gate, a very frightened juvenile starling huddled against a wall, shivering. No wonder: apart from being soaked in cat saliva, each and every tail-feather had been extracted from a now-naked behind.

Manouevering carefully to keep myself between the bird and any effective cover, I raced to catch it, expecting at any moment to be overtaken by the assassin (now using the cover of a high wall, to attempt a flanking manoeuvre). The little starling hopped and fluttered away from me for a few yards, then became hopelessly entangled in a dwarf pine - ouch! Seconds later, it was secured (in a former cat-carrier, the one we used for our cat (Sox) until he developed the muscle to simply shoulder his way through the door).

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Google got me some key bird facts: starlings need lots of protein, and birds generally tail-feathers regrow in 4-6 weeks, their loss being a common defensive mechanism. I read that minus tail-feathers, flight should still possible (which made sense - not much survival value in sacrificing a tail if you have to walk away afterwards). Excellent news.

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Our violently shivering little patient enjoyed a couple of hours resting and warming up in protective custody (our shed); fortunately for its peace of mind, it couldn't see our rascally cat as he tried, in succession, to tunnel through shed floor, to pry the doors open, to deglaze the windows. The would-be murderer was preparing to peel back the roof when I removed the patient to my car, and took off at speed, braking hard once or twice to shake any furry fiends from the undercarriage, and following up with a few hand-brake turns, just in case he was pursuing in another vehicle.

In a quiet lay-by between a small river and some exceptionally beautiful parkland, I put the cat box on the ground and opened the door for a flight test. With no homes close by, I could assume there weren't too many lurking housecats, and with plenty of bare ground, a flightless bird could easily be recaptured, while a flying one could soon reach good cover and good hunting. There was a momentary pause: then, with an explosion of beating wings, the patient shot from the box, and made an almost immediate lift off, climbing in a straight and steady line to a perch in a nearby a tree. The thrill of flight was amazing, as if I had taken to the air myself. I stayed a minute at the tree-lined river bank, enjoying the golden light of early sunset on the mass fresh green foliage and the warmth of a June evening; and then I drove home, to be sulked at by my rascally cat.

Columba livia domestica

Our resident lap-warmer and dog-scarer was waiting at the door for his breakfast, wearing his most winning "poor starving cat" expression. The performance would've been much more convincing if he had remembered to clean his blood-soaked face...

It wasn't his blood; our back garden looked as though a lunatic anatomist had been doing his dissection al fresco. A blood-mad killer he may be, but he does very neat work, tidily discarding offal like the stomach and intestines. On this morning, he had dismantled a racing pigeon (his largest prey to date, owing to an unfortunate local scarcity of Struthio camelus). The unfortunate bird (hailing from a loft in Dublin city) had been carefully butchered by his experienced claws, the wings neatly jointed, and the head set off to one side as a trophy.

The most interesting anatomical feature remaining was the rib cage, picked as clean as a whistle, which allowed me to get a really good look at the keel, a high thin ridge of bone which projects from the centre of the chest, running vertically along the centre line. The size of this bone (I estimate it stood about 30mm proud of the rib-cage proper) indicated the huge size of the (since devoured) muscles - the living engines that can propel a pigeon through the sky at 45 miles per hour, for many hundreds of miles. Fantastic creatures.

Rescue

Still bleary and slow with sleep, I had already served breakfast to our resident furry psychopath (FP) when I noticed the scatter of black feathers on the lawn - nearly a third of the grass being covered in down and flight feathers. The corpse of the victim, a female blackbird, lay upright, black eyes still bright and unclouded - a bit fresher than the maggot-ridden male blackbird that I had buried the previous evening.

On closer inspection, this little bird was still breathing, her sides heaving, but too exhausted to move - probably the only thing that kept her alive, since the FP will chase and rip at anything that moves (flies, dogs, laser beams). Her rump had been plucked almost completely bare, but she seemed otherwise intact. I scooped her up in a single (gloved) hand: she was very light, tiny beneath the bulk of her feathers, and trembling with fear. Could she could still fly, with only a single tail feather - or would it be kinder to give her a quick death? I couldn't bear to kill the terrified creature - especially since, having buried a male of the same species the previous night, I might be orphaning a nest-full of unfledged chicks, and even a small chance is better than none.

So I slipped her into the handiest container (a cat box!), then released her to the (relative) safety of An Undisclosed Location. The little bird hopped into the best available ground cover, then cowered and froze. Back in the garden, the FP had left his breakfast bowl and was scouring every nook and cranny for his reluctant playmate - but I told him nothing.

In the evening, she was gone, leaving no more feathers behind; and no fresh carcass appeared in the garden. I think perhaps she did survive - so will be keeping watch for a blackbird with a bald rump and a single tail feather. The moral dilemmas of the cat owner...