That's so sad Taz but lovely that you made him warm and comfortable before he was euthanased, as the alternative, like you said was to spend his last days hungry and in pain.
Three sad bird tales to tell I'm afraid. Two were down to my cat who normally takes no interest in catching birds.
Hubby and I have enjoyed watching a pair of blackbirds nest building in our hedge. My husband shouted me one morning when he went downstairs to tell me there was a dead bird in the dining room. It was a male blackbird and what looked like a thousand feathers everywhere. I was so upset and couldn't bring myself to speak to my cat for hours ( not that she understood)
Then earlier this week, the same thing but just small feathers and no remains. I am now locking the cat flap at night as I think just after dawn is danger time at this time of year.
She is a lazy cat who rarely leaves the house and never leaves our garden but the hunting instinct seems to have kicked in this year I'm sad to say.
The third sad thing happened on the allotment. I had noticed that whenever I approached the two incinerator barrels, I disturbed a small bird that appeared to fly up from the ground but too fast for me to identify. I mentioned it to my husband and I took a good look around the area and in both incinerators. I also moved a pile of dry green stuff that was piled nearby in case the bird was in there. I couldn't see any sign of a nest. A few days later I went up to join my husband on the allotment and he said he had something sad to tell me. He was tidying up and tipped the contents of the small incinerator into the larger one. Too late he spotted a nest with five eggs fall from the bottom of the small incinerator and break as they fell into the large one. We were both upset about it and I couldn't stop thinking about the hours that little bird had spent building the nest and caring for the eggs. I hadn't seen the nest because the bird had been flying up underneath the bottom of the incinerator where holes had been burned through.
Ariadne xx