The birds' feeding stations are at their busiest at this time of year, with both adults and this year's young competing for the food. This crowd - there are chaffinches, goldfinches, greenfinches and siskins in the mix, at least fifteen of them in all - are feeding on sunflower hearts in our front garden.
Two weeks ago we spotted this blackbird with what looked like a broken wing and a nasty abscess under it, and assumed we wouldn't see him again, but he was back a couple of days ago looking better.
He was one of several blackbirds we've seen. Their busy-ness indicated that several had chicks in the nest but there are now fewer mums and dads rushing back and forth with beak-fulls of food and more of the young sitting around wishing that their parents still fed them.
Since we've been in this house we've not had many starlings coming in to the garden but when, a couple of weeks ago, they did start to appear they came in droves, chasing the other small birds away and making themselves generally unpopular. We put up with it because the number of starlings has plummeted and we wanted to support them, but we had to restrain ourselves from going out and chasing them away. Then, suddenly, they were gone.
Other young we've seen have included this long-tailed tit which was with a small flock working its way noisily through the forestry near our house, and when....
....I was wandering in the hills on Thursday I managed to capture, at extreme range for my camera, a juvenile red kite working the hillside. We've had a pair of kites wheeling in the sky above us for some time, and it's good to see that their efforts have been rewarded.
Lastly, here's a picture of a female siskin, a species which we once considered so rare we used to get quite excited if we saw one. She's one of a dozen or more siskins we currently have visiting us, attracted by the sunflower seeds.
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