They were meant for the birds and the bees: a pair of dwarf sunflowers whose bright heads shone up at my kneecaps. Summer ran according to plan, the plants abuzz with insects sipping on their stores of nectar. When yellow and green browned into autumn, the sunflowers’ edible faces matured, each disc like a compound eye, only packed with seeds. We thought then that we would reprise their summer colours by attracting greenfinches and goldfinches to feed on them. We cut down the stems and laid them outside the patio doors, aiming to string them up for the birds that weekend.
For the next two mornings, reading over breakfast was interrupted by a movement in the corner of my eye. Though I searched the patio, I could not spot the elusive bird. A wren, I half-decided. On the second morning, my wife, Sarah, called me downstairs to sit at the patio window and watch for the invisible wren. After a few minutes, it appeared from behind a flowerpot, halting like a nervous actor at the curtained edge, fearful of stepping out onstage. Not a wren, but a wood mouse, with bulging blackcurrant eyes and huge round ears on a tiny body, the accentuated features of a nocturnal rodent that, right now, was making the most of a diurnal feast. Or rather a feast deferred, for it was soon evident that this mouse was collecting to cache.
It scampered out towards the sunflowers in a loping run, its whitish legs and feet a scissored blur, trailing the thinnest of tails, then stopped in front of one disc, raised itself on its hind legs and gnawed one of the seeds out of the sunflower’s face, before whipping off back behind the flowerpot. Twice more we watched it race and wrestle a seed from the sunflower, returning to the ivy-roofed border, where it could run with the voles among a tangle of logs and branches, and fill its burrowed tunnels with supplies for winter.
As for the goldfinches, they have a stand of knapweed, whose stems cannot bear the weight of even the lightest mouse.
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