Our small birds are frightened, very, very frightened. Despite the quantity and variety of food that's available to them, they've been conspicuously absent, so at some moments we've looked into the garden and seen not a sign of a bird, or....
....if there are any, they've been buried deep in the increasingly bare and revealing trees.
For the blackbirds this isn't too much of a problem as they've been busy eating the last of the berries in the rowans but for....
....the others it's been a matter of sitting, waiting, watching, plucking up courage and then....
....making a quick dash for the food and an equally rapid retreat back into the trees.
We know what the problem is as we found a small, sad pile of feathers on the lawn the other day, a sure sign that our sparrowhawk is back, though we have yet to see him. The victim was probably a tit, either a coal or a blue tit as we haven't seen a great tit in some time.
This crisis has meant that the number of birds coming into the garden is seriously down. Even the sparrows are suffering to the extent that we only see half-a-dozen or so at one time. Some species we've not seen in ages, such as goldfinch, greenfinch, siskin and woodpecker, but perhaps as the weather gets colder they'll be driven back into the garden to find food - and become food.
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