December 2011

Like November started warm but soon cooled down with the first dusting of snow on Monday (5th). Freezing rain over night and now gale force winds and still cold.
Birds are eating a feederful of sunflower seeds and one of buggy nibbles every day plus fat balls, nuts and ground food.
It's working though because yesterday we had a male bullfinch on a fly through, very handsome he was too. We have frequent visitor of a marshy-willow tit too but the long tails haven't really been back this year yet, I've heard them a few times but no visits to the feeding station.

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.

Moulting birds

3 September
The sun is out again today, it's a lovely day and the garden is full of birds. The nuthatch has been back a few times but Mrs Blackbird is looking rather bedraggled at the end of a full moult. Last week a very large family of long-tailed tits flew through as well. However, earlier in the week it was incredibly windy and many of the plants, especially the climbers have been battered and are looking very sorry for themselves.