Inappropriate Touching

Suddenly large numbers of these rather sinister signs have sprung up all over Greenwich Park.  I guess they are saying ‘It’s all right to pick chestnuts up off the ground but don’t try to knock ‘em off the trees’.  But ‘It is forbidden to touch the trees in any way’ evokes some very peculiar images.

Presumably the second half of the sign is aimed at Japanese tourists?  (‘Yus, we know who’s responsible…’)  Or are there gangs of illegal Chinese workers, like cockle-pickers, intent on denuding our chestnut trees of their nuts?  (Are they a Chinese aphrodisiac?)

Incidentally the trees were full of yakking green parakeets, whose feral population is growing, and visibly migrating, year by year.  By next summer they’ll be in our back gardens;  several flocks of them, of twenty or thirty birds each, flew over me (yakking) as I walked home.  I have a horrible premonition that in ten years’ time they will have ousted all indigenous birdlife in the Park, if not the whole of the south of England. 

And have you noticed how the hated invasive grey squirrels are growing smaller and cheekier, and are actually turning red?  Very Orwellian.  (I grew up with a cute stuffed red squirrel in a glass case, presumably shot by my maternal grandfather.  But it had so faded in the sun that no one would believe it was a red one…)

Looking on the brighter side, Bill Oddie thinks that global warming might give our native red squirrels a chance to fight back.  Apparently, it’s not that the grey squirrels are American and therefore (*ahem*) bigger and greedier;  just that their breeding cycle means they get to all the food and nesting sites before the red ones can.  But the reds’ cycle is changing, so it seems.

Also on the brighter side, the Rose Garden still has amazing numbers of beautiful roses in bloom – in the second week of October.  And I just heard a great tit going ‘teacher, teacher’ – does he think it’s March already?  Or is he hoping to fit in an extra brood before the winter sets in?  Hmm. 

And there’s a sinister grey battleship anchored alongside Greenwich Pier.  The times are out of joint…

Explore posts in the same categories: birds, Fun stuff, Greenwich, No one cares what you had for lunch

Tags: chestnuts, great tit, parakeets, squirrels

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