Hunger and holly berries...

There’s no mistaking winter’s nip and our Holly tree, which was covered in berries last weekend, has taken a battering from the winds. Now most of the berries sit on the ground like pools of beaded, bobbled, blood. What will we do to decorate the halls now I wonder?

The birds have come back to the feeders in numbers after an early autumn where they hardly bothered at all with the food left out for them. There must have been half a dozen tits on the feeder by the kitchen window this morning. Losing the berries will be a blow, a little less food to peck out when the softer fruits have gone.

I know I go on about the weather, the seasons change, but isn’t it in all of us? Isn’t it built in as a memory of the time when weather and season would determine if we ate or if we went hungry? I wonder how most of us would exists without supermarkets? It wasn’t so long ago that most of what we ate was either grown or reared by ourselves. I wonder how many of us could feed our families if we really had to provide, growing our own vegetables, keeping and killing our own animals.

Yes, no mistaking winter’s nip. It looks like being a hard one. The birds are going to need a little help this winter they can’t go to the supermarket; they can’t even grow their own food. Birds rely on the weather and seasons. If they are lucky they eat and if they aren’t they don’t.

Thinking about it, it’s no different for the majority of people in the world really. I wish it were as easy to put out food for them.