More and more it’s about the birds. Getting up in the morning at the moment is a musical delight, as the local avian population gives voice to their appreciation of warmer weather,  and earlier sunrises, and all the things going on that excite them. Flowers are busting out the kinds of salady grub to ensure the birds get their five a day. And speaking of grub, all manner of creepy-crawlies and insects and stuff are stirring from their winter slumbers – manna from heaven for your omnivorous birdies, if less appetising for you and me.

Plus, it’s the season when young birds’ thoughts turn to love – they’re mating, people. Pairing off. Building nests. Getting ready to incubate a clutch of eggs. Hitching a ride on the rollercoaster that is procreation. It’s all wholesome natural stuff — nothing tacky or pornographic: circle of life and all that.

Incidentally, as I pen these deathless sentiments, TV is repeating ads for a different kind of mating ritual – a reality series called The Bachelor in which handsome but clueless bearded lummock Lockie, encased in a too-tight suit, is incarcerated with a clutch of voracious young women who must compete for his favours. It’s a truly unedifying spectacle.

In ad after ad, Lockie, with swivel-eyed insincerity, stammers, “Beck could . . . literally be the one.” What better way to prepare for the joys and tribulations of a few decades’ marriage than a glorified version of spin-the-bottle? And would you want your daughter to primp and pose in competition with others to secure a Lockie? I think the birds do it much better.

We’ve been warned that the season is under way: word has gone around that local magpies are swooping the postie on his rounds, which as everyone knows is their way of protecting their turf – or airspace, really. It’s a seasonal thing, where any perceived threat to the nest gets dive-bombed and harassed as a matter of form. Apparently postmen – or letter-carriers as they’re now ungenderedly dubbed in some places – get an unfair proportion of their attention. Maybe it’s the Hi-Viz outfits.

We’re doing our best to ingratiate ourselves to the local magpies by sharing the odd sourdough leftovers. We’re told that magpies possess uncanny facial recognition skills – so at least our friend who pops by whenever there’s a bit of digging or hammering in the garden won’t be going into strafing mode when next we show up on two wheels.  

Of course, the magpies don’t know that the long-anticipated bird feeder now nearing completion is designed specifically to exclude them. Just a little more paint and a resolution of the finial conundrum (I just can’t call it a finial solution) and we’re in business. You’ll be delighted to know that a number of ways to incorporate finials into the design have suggested themselves and a result will be announced shortly.

It would be great if we had more birdlife in Corner Cottage’s garden than these rather angry-looking black-and-white magpies. I haven’t gone to all the trouble of building a feeder if there won’t be any patrons for it. But the signs are promising – fleeting glimpses of tiny cheeping birdlets, moving very fast, and then today, a whistling, fluting altercation – or courtship, who can tell – outside the living room window.

It was a couple of crimson rosellas (platycercus elegans) – as you know, a colourful subspecies of the eastern rosella – and member of the parrot family. They posed vividly a bit and flew up into the big old fir tree before disappearing, probably to a home with a functioning birdfeeder. But not before being captured in pixel format by yours truly lurking about with camera in hand.

Interestingly, modern science in all is sophistication can’t tell us exactly why rosellas’ colours differ by region and what specific role these colours play. In 1833, German zoologist Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger posited that the more humid the environment, the darker a bird will be.

This theory is borne out by our friend the rosella: crimson exemplars are commoner closer to the coast, while the ones inland are yellow, and in between, they go for a range of orangey shades. But we still don’t know why humidity drives colour variations.

And does that mean our magpies hang out in 100% humidity to get so black – with the white bits existing in a parched microclimate around the back of the neck? I don’t think so.

Anyway, rosellas mate for life, so the plumage doesn’t seem to be about attracting a spouse. Because once hitched, they’d surely drop all the gorgeousness and slump into a comfy, low-maintenance mid-grey, don’t you think?

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that their bond is lifelong (and they live for 25 years) — not just for spring, but through the winter too. Irish poet and political agitator William Butler Yeats celebrated the monogamy of the Wild Swans at Coole:

Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

I reckon what’s good for swans is good enough for rosellas. Sauce for the goose, if you will.