I’m sure that even the least experienced bird-feeder will recognise that there is something amiss with the peanut feeder in this photo. The funny thing is we don’t know how it happened. It could be one of two things:

1. Just the sheer brute force of the wind could have knocked over the bird table – although the bird table is a big, weighty thing that’d take some knocking over. We have had winds of over 40 m.p.h. this week but even so…
2. It could be the badgers back. You see we’ve been having “troubles” with badgers.

Not that we've ever seen one. We see "badger latrines" (google them) and we see dirty great paw prints on the sides of the bins and if they're not badgers then they're yettis or bears and either way, that seems a bit unlikely.

It pains me to say that because there is a great big bit of me that thinks it’s not possible to have trouble with badgers, we should consider it a privilege and an honour to have them in the garden. And we do. Honest. The problem is one of their table manners. They come in, take the lids off the feed bins (galvanised dustbins full of 25kg sacks of peanuts, wild bird mix, fat balls, sunflower seed and nyjer seed) and help themselves. That in itself is no problem. They never take more than they want and there is always plenty left for the birds. The “trouble” occurs because they leave the lid off the bin and, because it never stops raining in Cornwall, whatever is inside is soaked. If it’s peanuts they get infected by Aspergillus niger, a highly toxic, carcinogenic fungal infection that we don’t want to pass on to our precious garden birds. If it’s seed, it goes all soggy and then you can bet your socks that in a few days’ time it’ll end up sprouted.

Either way, feeding the badgers becomes very expensive. I’ve thought about leaving food out for them so they don’t need to break into the bins but that might attract rats or make our own dog-lets very fat! The problem is we can’t keep on wasting food that we can barely afford to buy in the first place and we can’t store it inside because we don’t have room so the solution was to put bungees across the lids and through the handles. Well that worked…for all of two weeks. So, back to square one. I spent half an hour in a DIY shed looking for something that could sort the problem and eventually settled on some catches that for wont of knowing what they are really called they’re going to be known as tie-down rings. Effectively they are metal plates with a d-ring on one end that I’ve bolted into the sides of the bins so the bins can now be bungeed at right angles in a big X. It’s worked.

The badgers got in a rage. They decided that they were going to have some peanuts whatever I thought so they swiped the bird table over, grabbed the peanut feeder and took all of the nuts. They smashed to bits the old (rather tatty) bird table in the process but I don’t think they gave that a second thought.

One of the bins is filled with kindling, not food so I didn’t bother bungeeing that one. BIG MISTAKE. Now, every morning, the lid is back off it and the kindling is soggy. Grrrrr.

We got a swanky new bird table. I embellished it with hooks for the feeders for fat balls, nyjer, peanuts and sunflowers. Yesterday I came down to find it on the floor and the peanut feeder is, as you can see, somewhat knackered. So, was it the wind or was it brock?