This is miserable weather for the small birds. Yesterday's promise of a thaw didn't last long as the temperatures dropped below zero last night, and then, to add to their joys, today saw the beginnings of a hoar frost. We've been putting out large quantities of food - peanuts, fat cakes, mixed seeds and, their favourite, sunflower kernels - to try to keep them going. In return, we've had the pleasure of being able to sit in comfort indoors while watching a wide range of different species including blue and coal tits....
....siskins....
....and goldfinches, which seem to have no trouble in landing on our bird feeders while the chaffinches struggle.
We're certainly not short of chaffinches, nor of....
....blackbirds: half a dozen of them have spent more of our brief daylight hours chasing each other than feeding.
The forecast is for steadily rising temperatures over the next few days which, hopefully, will start the long process of thawing out the snow, much of which is now compacted into layers of very solid ice.
We managed to get out for a short walk into the countryside this afternoon, seeing nothing of interest except....
....what we took to be rabbit toilets, though I didn't think that rabbits' pee is coloured a rusty pink.
So glad you are feeding the birds. One of my peanut feeders has a large rusty hole in the lid, big enough to allow the tits to pop inside to remove whole peanuts. They even dash right to the bottom when nearly empty and then climb out again. You might like to build a peanut feeder that only the tits can access, by using an open tube of mesh or just leave the lid off another. Other less inventive birds will still be able to peck at the sides for their lunch. By the way, your blackbird is a young (darker bill) Fieldfare. Have you seen any Redwings?
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea for a peanut feeder, Derryck - thank you, will try it.
DeleteI did wonder what that 'blackbird' was but it never occurred to me that it was a fieldfare. And, no, we haven't seen any. redwings yet, which is surprising.