Birds

I am no 'twitcher'. I don't have the inclination or the patience to seek out and photograph birds in the wild but I do like watching and listening to them in the garden and on our walks if we chance upon them.

We feed them with peanuts and sunflower seeds between November and June every year getting through about 25kg of each. I have tried mixed seeds in the past but the tits and finches, which are the main visitors to the feeding station, show no interest in other kinds of seeds and just drop them on the ground below, fishing out only the sunflower seeds. This is useful for the ground feeding birds like robins and dunnocks but also attracts rats and mice which I would rather not encourage since they multiply rapidly if they find a good food source and can become a pest. Tits especially are messy feeders and drop quite a lot of peanut crumbs on the ground for the other birds to find though not enough to give a feast to these pests.

I consider the money spent on this bird food well worth it. Apart from watching them on the feeders outside the kitchen window keeping them going through the winter means there are lots of tits to take caterpillars and aphids from the trees and plants in the garden to feed to their young and plenty of finches to eat most of the weed seeds. You could say these small creatures are a natural pesticide, far safer and less damaging to the environment than chemicals.

Most of the photographs are taken through the kitchen window of birds visiting the long feeders, We do have several other smaller feeders enclosed inside a plastic box with an open bottom. This is squirrel proof and also protects the birds from the weather, sparrow hawks and kestrels while they are feeding. Unfortunately the double glazing of the window and the plastic of the box make it difficult to get good photographs of  the birds using these protected feeders and unfortunately the finches hardly ever visit the long feeders.

I will be adding new pictures and exchanging existing ones for better ones so watch this space!!