By now you will realise that I am mad about the birds in my garden, they give us such great entertainment & pleasure, occasionally we will get something rare happening, but generally it is the everyday fairly common garden birds that are our favourites. One thing I have been meaning to tell you, Back in June (I told you on here) I had Megan come & ring some of the garden birds for me & we had a Siskin from Belgium amongst them, well we have now got the details from the B.T.O. about the bird. It was ringed the previous November in a place called Nassogne , just outside Luxembourg in Belgium. So in that 211 days it had flown in a NW direction to us travelling a distance of 955km. Isn’t that incredible for a wee bird that only weighed 14.7g.
What I hadn’t realised is though I have often shown you the many birds in the garden, I have never really shown you what attracts them all to our garden, it is of course my various feeding stations. Therefore today I will show you them, and because they are numerous we have to purchase the food to put in the holders and I can assure you the sacks of peanuts, sunflower seeds, niger seed, superior bird seed with fruit in it, plus the live mealworms do not come cheap. In fact monthly we nearly spend as much money on the birds food as we do our own.
So below are the feeding stations & some of the birds feeding on a couple, plus of course a Red Squirrel.
So this is the main feeding station with most variety, going from left to right, my hide with the front pointing towards the garden pond to snap birds drinking. The thin wooden strip on the side of the tree stump is a water bowl & fruit holder, we occasionally put an apple on the spike. The two logs horizontally placed, one on a stump the other held up by rope, these are hollowed out & hold bird seed. the two tubes at the back are Niger seed holders suspended from a horizontal tree branch & the green lidded triple feeders are Peanut, Sunflower seed & fat ball holders. All waste is collected in the builders mixing tray below it all. In the Silver Birch tree are the Squirrel feeding box with Peanuts in & above is the Peanut Butter feeder. Please excuse the corrugated iron sheets, they are our 4 compost bins which get moved down every year as the first bin is distributed around the garden by the wife, so it is beautiful loam, produced every 4 years. The green pole on the far right is our log splitter, that has had a fair bit of use this year (thanks Eric & Val).
The two giant Peanut holders (that , at this time of the year, get emptied by the birds & squirrels every 10 days or so) , complete with red that saw me coming & jumped off the feeder. But as you can see from the next shot as soon as it saw it was me it just hopped back up & continued feeding. The feeders are right in front of our dining room window & you can just sit there for ages & watch the action.
The last main station is in front of the kitchen windows & consists of two Emma Bridgewater bird mugs that have a few chips in & are filled daily (& emptied daily by the birds) with seed, plus the Peanut holder on the Birch. The following bird shots were all taken around these feeders within the first hour of filling them.
The three shots above are of course of our newly acquired friend the Nuthatch, we have occasionally in the past had one pay us a visit, but as you have seen from previous blogs one has set up residence with us this year. In fact we were really delighted yesterday morning when we spotted two at these very feeders together, a real thrill. So the first shot shows a familiar action by most visitors to the mugs, they seem to stop before going in for the goodies, see what they fancy & then dive in and get it, as shown in shot two. The third shot was when it realised I was there taking photos of it.
The Coal Tit is such a fast speedy little bird & darts into the mug & is off elsewhere to eat whatever it managed in that split second, when they take the black sunflower seeds from the main feeding station they tend to eat a few then come back & collect more & bury them, hence in the spring we have sunflowers sprouting up in strange places around the garden.
Male Chaffinch again having a look in first before diving in for the feed.
Just love his haircut.
Just two shots of this lovely Blue Tit. Not sure if it was via our nesting boxes, but this winter we have more Blue Tits than we have ever had before, one day this week I counted 14 on the two big peanut feeders, a shear joy to see so many.
Below the feeders the ever crafty Robin picks up the scraps dropped by the messy feeders like the Blackbird. Particularly liked this shot as the bird was in amongst the bushes feeding away with no opposition from others, just stocking up the fat for the Winter we are expecting to start tomorrow.
A Great Tit preferring the nuts to the seeds.
I have shown you a cross section of the birds on the feeders, not included & if it had been warmer today I may have shown you more. So maybe I will try & collect a few more sometime as what is missing is:- Long Tailed Tits, G.S. Woodpeckers, Jay, Collar Doves, House Sparrows, Dunnocks, occasional Brambling, Blackbirds, very rare (for us) Starlings, Redwing, Fieldfare , not forgetting the Sparrowhawks that managed a smaller bird most days.