It is April and at last the garden is adorned with all the various kinds of daffodils. It has been a particularly long and cold winter and who knows, the temperature might just get to above +5 degree C by Easter?

All through the winter months I have been doing my bit for British Birds (or more especially Scottish ones!) by spending a fortune on those tiny black sunflower seeds that they seem to like so much. Fat balls, peanuts and black seeds are the preferred diet of a miscellany of blue tits, great tits, coal tits, chaffinches, a few hardy and always quarrelsome sparrows, and the occasional siskin and greenfinch.

In addition any spare bread or burnt toast or even left over rice from the odd Chinese take-away supper is welcome fodder, especially for the larger birds such as blackbirds, starlings, thrushes and the local population of jackdaws and crows who have the large trees around the village as a permanent penthouse from which to descend on any garden they choose.

My absolute favourite birds are the tiny coal tits and the slightly larger blue tits. How these amazing creatures survive the week after week of bitter weather we have up here amazes me. At any rate they provide endless fascination on even the shortest and darkest days of deepest midwinter. A blessing of liveliness and sheer determination to survive, come what may.

And then there are the pheasants, not very intelligent but gaudy refugees from the local "sporting estates" - although what exactly is sporting about shooting a bird that is the equivalent of a battery hen with plumage or a short sighted refugee from the tropics abandoned at Heathrow without his luggage quite escapes me. Sometimes I think the only thing more stupid than pheasants are the people who shoot them.

Last but not least are the pigeons. We have one in particular, nickname "Percy" (not exactly original but it serves well to describe this pompous overweight specimen whose time is spent under the seed feeders gorging himself on the seeds (usually the two-thirds of seeds) that the smaller birds drop onto the border below the window sill.

Now Percy eats bread, and scraps, and peanuts, and anything else his beady eyes light on, but he does have an especial liking for sunflower seeds.

And that, I imagined, was why, as the winter months ground onward, Percy got decidedly plumper whilst, in spite of my best efforts, the small bird population was thinning out in both senses of the expression.

Until, purely by chance, a week ago, I happened to enter the kitchen one early morning and found Percy perched on the outside window sill, stretching and just getting to a conveniently (for him) placed seed feeder. In the space of about five minutes, with the expert rhythm of a well practised thief, Percy must have consumed a couple of hundred seeds that should have sustained many a smaller bird.

We are told that there is no justice in Nature, just the inevitable Darwinian dirge that the fittest survive because they adapt to changing circumstances. Was I witnessing the process of evolution on my window sill? Was Percy pursuing his Darwinian survival or was he adapting to his circumstances? In Percy's mind he saw the food source and reasoned, if I can get it with a bit of good balancing, is that not just as worthy as the blue tit's skill at hanging upside down from the feeder to get a single seed?

As I finally moved to nearer the window to satisfy my urgent need for coffee Percy spotted me and flew off, rather noisily as if to drive home the point that in the real world, if you want to eat breakfast, you need to follow the example of the intelligent pigeon, not lie abed until the alarm went off.

So does my tale have a point or is it just a long ramble? Well you may ask, but I couldn't possibly comment. However the news that morning was all about banking fat cats and whether Sir Fred Goodwin should turn up trumps and give his enormous pension back to the people as a gesture of solidarity with us poor taxpayers who have bailed out his bank after his spell in charge.

Of course he refused. In the real world, as Percy would tell you, you grab what you can if the rest of us feel like a load of tits then it is too bad, that is our fault or that of Darwin. Survival is what it is all about, not who deserves more seeds, but who can reach and get them.