Death, rivalry, tension — that’s my garden mid-afternoon

‘Have you seen my fat balls?” asked my wife. She was pointing out of the window into the garden at her newly-installed bird feeder, which brings the total to four. There is one devoted to peanuts and one specifically for the sunflower hearts, which are meant to attract goldfinches. And now the fat balls. Her new hobby may have tipped over into obsession.

“You’re going to be responsible for an obesity crisis,” I said. It would be fair to say the project has been a success. My wife’s mixed seed brings all the birds to the yard: Finches, tits, sparrows, robins, even ring-necked parakeets. Things get pretty noisy in the afternoons. The two pigeons that live in the bay tree periodically swoop down to hoover up any seed that falls to the ground. What they miss sprouts from the gravel.

I am mildly diverted by my wife’s new bird friends, but no one is more captivated than the cat, which is still working out how to kill one. It spends hours crouched flat on the shed roof, or secreted in the undergrowth just feet from the where the pigeons peck. I sometimes feel that we’re basically stocking a game park for its diversion. I’ve deliberately blown the cat’s cover a couple of times, but I’ve also watched in silence on several occasions, just to see how close it can get. So far, so hopeless: The feeders are safely off the ground, and the pigeons seem to have decided that the cat hiding in the flower bed constitutes an acceptable level of risk when weighed against free seed. But I’ve also been preparing myself for the day the cat’s persistence is finally rewarded, and I have to change the way I feel about the whole project.

Dog day afternoon

While eating lunch last week, I heard something that made me think the cat’s day had arrived: Through the open garden door came the sound of a violent struggle, all the more horrible for the lack of any noises of protest — just a sudden pouncing, and a lot of shaking and flapping. It went on for a while. I exchanged a glance with my wife, and then reluctantly put down my fork and went to the window. What I saw made me change the way I felt about lunch. Lunch, as far as I was concerned, was over.

In the middle of the patio, the predator was standing over its just-dispatched quarry. But it wasn’t the cat: It was the dog. And it wasn’t a bird: It was a rat — a large, dead, bloodied rat. “Don’t be so squeamish,” said my wife, rolling the rat into a dustpan while I tried to resist hopping from foot to foot. “So the whole time we thought we were feeding the birds,” I said, “we were basically just putting out rat food.”

I am used to coming downstairs in the morning to find half a mouse on the kitchen floor staring up at me with that “How bad is it, Sarge?” look in its eye. But I guess I always imagined I was a marvellous exception to that rule about no one ever being more than 20 feet from a rat. I know there are plenty of rats in London; I’d just managed to convince myself none of them lived near me.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole episode was the instant transformation of the dog from needy Jack Russell to animal with a calling. I don’t know if there are more rats out there, but the dog certainly thinks so. It stands with its nose pointed into the wind, ears cocked. It patrols narrow crevices behind the flower pots it never knew were there, snorting and scrabbling.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad the dog has found some purpose beyond staring at me balefully from the sofa — but it’s a little unnerving to have a rat-hunt going on while you’re trying to do the sudoku. It’s a jungle out there.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Tim Dowling is a Guardian journalist.