Small Bird Report

This is the view of our tiny back yard from the kitchen sink, with a bird table, a fat ball, and three suspended feeders visible. We're fortunate that a neighbour has a large holly tree near our fence, and most of the small birds who visit us use this as protection and a vantage point.

The most common birds at the feeders are the house sparrows, who turn up in groups of about six and squabble over who can have first go on the bird table. Some of them have learned how to work the suspended feeders and can even 'hover' to eat the fat ball.

We're not short of blackbirds either, both local ones - the males have orange beaks - and the immigrants from Scandinavia, which have dark beaks.

The first on to our feeders were the coal tits (above), followed by the blue tits and, finally, a great tit. Having shown the way, they've now been rather crowded out by the other birds though, considering their size, the coal tits can be remarkably pushy.

A great deal of the fun goes out of feeding the small birds once the starlings arrive. At first they come singly but now they're here in ravening flocks. They're a very smart bird but they're loud, quarrelsome and bullies.

There are some notable absentees. We have yet to see a siskin in Golspie, and the chaffinches, which were the most common bird in Kilchoan, are only to be found in small numbers by the Golspie Burn. Yellowhammers, too, are missing: again, they were a common bird in Kilchoan but they really belong in open fields, yet had disappeared from our area of Suffolk.

That said, we're thrilled at the number of small birds we have, such a change from Suffolk where we were often lucky to see more than half a dozen small birds in a day. Their numbers may be explained by an apparent and surprising absentee from the area - the domestic cat.