It is not all rose tinted glasses here in Blair Atholl, a few things against it include distance to decent shops & supermarkets, Perth is over 30miles away along the dreaded A9 & another fault is delivery of goods ordered on the internet. Sometimes we have to pay more because we are in this remote place called the Highlands, the annoying thing about this con is that a vast majority is delivered by Royal Mail so does not cost the companies any more than if it was going 100yds down the road. Today we are awaiting a new vacuum cleaner as ours blew up over the weekend, the delivery time allocated to us is between 7am & 7pm, so of course no wondering off for one of us, just got to wait until it turns up.
So as I am having a quiet day I thought I would share some of the birds that visit our garden (apart from yesterdays Sparrows that is). Below is a selection, I will save the many more until another quiet day.
First is birds on the Niger seed feeder, 8 of which are Siskins with a stray Chaffinch on the left. Next is a female Chaffinch, followed by the male. Everybody knows the Robin even though most of us only think of it living here over Christmas, on our cards. This is followed by a male Siskin, my favourite little bird, stands up for itself against bigger birds on the feeders, but also such wonderful colours. Lastly for today we have the humble Blackbird, we have an affinity with these be they our winter visitors or our resident birds.
Every morning when we get up, waiting for us on the back doorstep our normally 3 couples of Blackbirds & eventually their young as well, at least a total of 8 sometimes more. The reason being that, even before the kettle goes on, they know they will be fed a handful of sultanas, this goes on several times during the day after their morning feed. In fact if we have the back door open in the summer, one or two now venture in to the low shelf where the sultanas are kept in a container & help themselves. We normally reckon a 84p bag of sultanas will last for 3 days before it is gone, our birds do eat well & I will explain the other feeds we give them when I have that next quiet day.
