Agnes

AGNES G.

L.

PURSER

I show this photograph to an acquaintance I am often congratulated upon my patience, but, as a matter of fact, it was Agnes who exhibited that virtue. I took out my camera to set it up in readiness to photograph her when she came to the bird-table at the window, but she arrived at once, not because she was interested in photography, but because she knew that I had in my pocket what is known as the little red box (an old typewriterribbon tin) in which there would be a mixture of chopped cheese and pastry, of which she, like so many birds, is very fond. And she waited patiently on the upturned dish while I arranged the camera, focussed it, adjusted the diaphragm and shutter speed, and actually made the exposure! She was then rewarded as she deserved to be, and later I was delighted to find that she had provided us with as good a memento of her as we could wish for.

WHEN

She came to us during the latter part of January last year, a few days after St. Agnes' Day, hence her name. Our resident Robin was Buttons, so-called because his wing feathers had light tips which gave the impression of pairs of buttons on his back, like the pair on a tail coat. Their first nest was not in our garden, so we are not sure about the dates, but they were definitely feeding chicks on the 15th April, which was during a spell of very bad weather, including snowstorms and long downpours of rain.

So we were not surprised to notice, eight days later, that they had given up taking away food from the bird-table and had, apparently, failed to rear their first brood.

This conclusion proved correct because the very next day Agnes started building in a nesting-box in our garden. The young hatched on the 15th May, and, as all went well, they duly left the nest on the 28th. But Agnes was still in a hurry and on the Ist June she started building in Cherry-tree Cottage, as one of our nesting-boxes is named. For some reason, however, she changed her mind and used the old kettle in a hawthorn hedge. They began to feed their third brood about the 22nd, but I have no note in my diary of the exact date of this or when they left the nest.

On the 12th July, however, Agnes was building her fourth nest as fast as she could in a nesting-box Robins had never used before, while Buttons went on feeding his youngest family for at least another week.

By this time there were quite a lot of Robins about the garden, some of which were quite ready to run the gauntlet of their parents so as to feed on the table at the window, but Agnes and Buttons were the only ones really tame. They, and our hen Chaffinch, had no hesitation about Coming into the drawing-room to take food out of the little red box placed on a chair just by the garden door.

396 Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists',

Vol. 16, Part 6

When the door was closed and the shallow window over it open, the Robins used to enter that way, dropping down onto the chair, picking up some food for their chicks and then Aying up and out through the window again, now the one, now the other, but sometimes both on the chair together. But whether they were both there or only one, Buttons always helped himself from the little red box on the door side, while Agnes always faced the way out.

Well, the last of the fledglings left the nest on the 14th August and, on the very same day, Agnes departed for a well-deserved holiday, after four nests and incubating four clutches of eggs in twenty weeks! Buttons remained to cope with the last family, which he did very well, and sometimes there would be two of the three youngsters being fed by him on the window bird-table; but not very long after he had finished feeding them he disappeared and we had, for a time, no very tarne Robin about. In the early part of October, however, a very tarne Robin, its moult finished and looking extremely well, turned up and we wondered who it could be: it had the prominent feathers on the side of its head that Agnes had had, but we were not sure. So we decided to put it to the test, and on 1 Ith October we had the drawing-room door open for a while with the little red box on the chair where it used to be put during the summer. We had not long to wait before the Robin arrived, and, when it flew up onto the chair, it promptly went round the little red box to feed facing the exit! So there was no doubt that it was Agnes following her old habit after an interval of nearly eight weeks! From that time onwards she has been the resident Robin in the part of the garden close to the back of the house, and it was on the 9th December that she was so co-operative about having her photograph taken. She has now got a new mate, very shy and unsociable, and we are wondering whether she will have as strenuous a breeding seasonin 1967as she had in 1966.