It's an important time of year for our garden in that we'd like to make sure it has a good selection of small birds fit and ready to stay with us and give us amusement through the coming winter. On the house sparrow front we appear to have little to worry about as there are hoards of them, swooping down as soon as any food is put out to hoover it all up, but we know from grim experience that their numbers decline frighteningly fast between the hammer of the local sparrowhawk and the anvil of bitter weather.
The chaffinches seemed to disappear from the garden for several months but they're back in good numbers, and are one of the species which has learned to enjoy niger. We've a sack of the stuff in the utility room which we - vainly - put out in the hope of attracting more unusual species like goldfinches and siskins but now the chaffinches, sparrows and even some of the tits are eating it. It's obviously an acquired taste.
This chaffinch was one of the first birds onto a new feeder, a small bowl placed on a brick on the sill right in front of the kitchen sink. The coal tits, encouraged by some sunflower seeds, were - as always - first on to it with the blue tits next and then this chap following pretty quickly, but then....
....everything went down hill because the sparrows must have been watching what was going on and muscled in on the show.
Like the chaffinches, we suddenly have several great tits in the garden, bullying the blue tits off the peanut feeders and taking no nonsense from the sparrows. It's good to see them but it would be nice to have more of the unusual birds visit us. About our most exciting visitors have been a pair of collared doves, a very smart song thrush, and....
....this pair of wood pigeons. In East Anglia the wood pigeons went around in gigantic flocks fed, I suppose, by the big arable fields, but here they behave as normal wood pigeons, so we most often see them in or near.... the woods.
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