Spring gardening

Finally, managed to make a start on the spring cleaning.


At the weekend the big border went from this:

 To this:

The birds are singing, a beautiful song thrush stands on the top of Green Garth's larch and tell the whole world it's a wonderful sunny spring morning; the robins are shouting their territories and the finches and spuggies tweet and whistle along too.

I don't know where the siskins have been all winter but they've arrived back this past week, already dressed in their "Sunday Best" looking very bright and smart.

Bird feeders

It's been wet and windy over the last few days, in the early hours of Wednesday I thought the windows were coming in such was the ferocity of the wind and hail. The silver lining to this cloud has been the huge influx of birds to the feeders (the bad news being the quantity of feed being consumed, but you can't have everything!).
Today we've been visited by large numbers of chaffinches and greenfinches plus the noisy squabbling goldfinches and the first siskins arrived at lunch time followed by two bramblings this afternoon. Also visiting today were blue tits, great tits, coal tits, house sparrows (no trees today) dunnocks, robins (two) and at least one nuthatch. Mrs Blackbird has been jumping up and down on the window sill demanding her buggy nibbles and a thrush was rummaging in the shrubbery.

Snow and hoards of hungry birds

Yes, more, and more. A couple of feet so far and now it's freezing solid.
The bird feeding stations have been doing a roaring trade (must order more food...!). Yesterday there were four robins, carefully watching each other and taking turns; today there were three.
We've also seen a redwing in the holly tree on a couple of occasions. When the finches numbered over fifty we stopped counting but all three main groups have been here in great numbers along with lots of bramblings. One bird which is missing is the siskin, we have seen only one or two.