I have had a stressful day, mostly dealing with personnel management issues.
The starlings who live on the back corner of the house have taken to abusing me when I water the pots on the patio. They shout at me until I go away. I found myself shouting at them this morning, "If you want to farking live here, then you fit in with me or piss off!" I thought this was a reasonable position to take, but it confused the unseen visitor who arrived round the corner of the house at that point, not remembering ever having proposed to move in here.
Then, I had to have words with the cat. She generally does an hour's security work in the late morning, and has kept house and shed rodent-free for 18 months now. For this, she gets a couple of biscuits when our paths cross. She does also train the birds in escape and evasion techniques - it's largely only the sparrows that go along with that and one of them failed to pass a continuous assessment test this morning - as a result, no biscuits were issued. The robin takes no part in this and the cat does not seem to consider herself up to training the crows or even the blackbirds or thrushes - and the wagtails just ignore her, as they do me.
One of the young robins seems to have been detailed to investigate the shed and so I had to remove him - I now have to keep the door shut, which is a nuisance, but I'm not going through the 'creche phase' again.
Keeping the door shut does also stop the swallows from whizzing round inside it - although, only one of them seemed to stop and inspect a potential nest site so far.