Christopher

Thank you everybody who voted to give the little Robin a name 🙂

The most popular name was Christopher and that is how I will remember him.

He’s gone 😦

I haven’t seen him since Wednesday. He wasn’t there when I opened my door on Wednesday morning, he only showed up once that day, I think to say goodbye and I haven’t seen him since.

What happened?

There were too many Robins. I was seeing four birds every time I looked out of my window. I think they were last year’s brood and that they just hadn’t dispersed yet. Christopher must have been one of the juveniles.

I don’t think that he was hit by a bus, just because he did come to see me once on that last day. I think that he had to leave and find a territory of his own.

I put off writing this post. I am a bit disappointed, just because it took me three months to get him eating out of my hand and I miss seeing him when I open my door.

The way that I see it is that it was a wonderful experience and there is nothing at all to regret and I will try again.

Take care Christopher (I have to stop calling him little bird now). Thank you.

Now that was a sad post. I have got another post to write today. The Dog has been saying some things about me that are not completely true and I have some beautiful pictures to show you.

She Sings

I think that we have a new brood on the way. There is a lot of sitting on the nest going on.

A bird has taken to sitting just outside of my window.

She chatters away and she sings really loudly… at four o’clock in the morning.

Of course I sleep with my windows wide open, you would do too. It is a beautiful summer sound. Most of the other birds have given up on the dawn chorus but the Swallows are as noisy as ever. I have been trying to record her but I am getting a lot of engine noise from my camera and I am not happy with the results yet.

Ha Ha! She is chattering away as I write this 🙂

It looks like it is going to be a nice day, lots of blue sky.

Mum Says…..

A bit more father son interaction from yesterday and this time it is Blackbirds.

I was watching this bird enjoying a bit of “me time” on the far side of the garden.

He seemed to be enjoying himself, without a care in the world.

Then Junior turned up and it looked for all the world, like he was delivering a message.

The Blackbird listened intently and then he got up and hurried off on some errand.

“Mum says, you are to stop doing whatever it is that you think you are doing and….”

I shall never know.

Raising Sparrows

It has not all been “Doom and Gloom” today. There has been a lot of this sort of thing going on……

We haven’t actually had juvenile House Sparrows yet have we?

Songbirds face a lot of perils in their lives but they just get on with it and they continue to thrive.

Just a Redbreast

Hi, I wanted to have a crack at the garden birds this evening but at the end of the day the light just wasn’t good enough and this little Robin was all that I could manage.

Have you seen the price of Mealworms?

Remember our Blackbirds nesting in the tractor?

We haven’t had much on the blog about them because Blackbirds have a very low survival rate, only about 30% of nests go on to produce fledglings. I was not prepared to do anything to add to the difficulties they faced. Forget the photographs I just want healthy birds.

Yesterday I set the camera up to video the tractor so that I could monitor the comings and goings of the parent birds. It didn’t make compulsive viewing so I didn’t blog it. It was just a quick flash of a parent going in or coming out once every couple of minutes but I did make extensive notes:

F in L/Side  1:45

F out R/Side 2:38

That kind of thing. Poor little beggars don’t stand a chance.

Sometimes you can know too much for your own good and sure enough when I lifted the bonnet of that tractor today the nest was empty.

It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

Have you seen the price of mealworms?

There is something that I want to show you….

Jack knocked on my door last night, he wanted to show me something.

Jack renovates and sells tractors and other farm machinery and he can often be found working in the yard, he also helps out with the sheep and any other jobs that need doing.

He wanted to show me a Blackbird nest.

It is in his tractor. Under the bonnet.

I am nervous about how I approach this. I don’t want to do anything to disturb the nest but I do want to have a look. The parent birds don’t seem to be around so I am going to lift the bonnet.

There are four chicks. Their eyes are open. This is cool I am going to try to watch them develop but this is a different situation from the Swallows, I have to be very careful around the nest.

There is something that I should tell you. Survival rates are very poor for the Blackbird, both eggs and nestlings. At best only about 30% of nests achieve fledged young. They are very vulnerable to  predators but the most important factor seems to be weight, the birds have to be getting enough food.

Well I am going to watch them anyway and we shall see how they do.

We shall feed them up.

You take what you need my friend, never for a minute did I think that you were greedy and of course I haven’t got a Blackbird gun.

The Gift Bird

This was just something that we were not expecting, a Grey Wagtail.

We had been out for seven or eight hours and we were both feeling a bit tired, I decided that we should take a break. Fizz could have a little sleep and I would do some fishing.

I was trying to photograph the fish in the water but it didn’t work very well and then this little bird came and perched on a fallen tree beside us.

Fizz likes to sleep on my lap with her head and front legs resting on my camera arm and if I move that arm she has to wriggle about and jump up and down to get comfortable again. It is so endearing.

This is a male bird. The female looks just  the same except that she doesn’t have that black throat/bib.

Horrible May!

Yes. Horrible May and the very serious consequences of horrible Mays. This is also going to be a post about what you can do about it (Positivity).

What’s going on? This is the one month of the year that I really look forward to. Also this is the month that nature has decided is the best time to be born into the wild.

Wrong!

So Blue Tits. (Yes and blue toes, it’s freezing, raining and there is a gale blowing)

If you feed the birds regularly then you may have noticed a change in their behaviour in the last couple of weeks. My landlord mentioned it to me, he was talking about the Goldfinches, he is very fond of them, he said, “They don’t seem to come around much now.” In fact they are still here and food is disappearing from the feeders faster than ever but the bird’s visits are much shorter.

They are feeding their newly hatched chicks. They can’t feed them peanuts or sunflower hearts. They need high protein insect food and much of the adult bird’s day is going to be spent feeding it’s young. Putting food out in the garden means that the parents can feed themselves quickly and gives them more time to spend on more important things.

Sadly bad weather in May can have a devastating impact on our song birds. Caterpillars get washed off the trees. There just isn’t enough food around at the very time when it is most needed.

Blue Tits have a large brood, it can be as many as fifteen but eight to ten is more common. Each chick requires about a hundred caterpillars a day. Ten chicks equals a thousand caterpillars a day. They don’t need rain.

Seriously I have seen this weather pattern before and there has been a massive decline in song bird numbers come the summer.

The only thing that we can do to help them is to put out food for the adult birds. Please don’t think that winter is over and they don’t need it any more, they need you now more than ever.

Numbers go up and numbers go down, nature is cruel and whatever happens they will recover but ..

IT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE BIRDS IN THE GARDEN THIS SUMMER!

Poxy weather.

Feed the birds. They will love you for it.

The most beautiful song.

The Blackbird is my number one song bird and so now I am going to do a little post  about blackbirds with a few pictures.

The dawn chorus just wouldn’t be the same without his rich melody.

My little granary flat is not very well soundproofed and that is actually good. There are no noisy neighbours to worry about. I like to sleep with the curtains open so that the dawn light wakes me and birdsong is my radio. It feels natural.

Blackbirds are an important part of our garden community. They don’t really use the bird feeders but they share the meal worms I scatter on the grass with Robins and Dunnocks and just recently a Song Thrush.. (They will all have their own posts).

I like blackbirds, they have character.

Ha Ha! It’s not just raining on you mate.

There are female Blackbirds too but just now I can’t find pictures that really bring out their beauty and I don’t want to make them look dowdy. I shall work on that one and give them their own post.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..