The Birds
I think I mentioned our bird tree before?
This is an apple tree which is in full view for Herself through her window when she’s ensconced in her room. It’s not really an apple tree as it hasn’t produced a single apple in donkey’s years.
The tree was somewhat damaged during the Beech tree felling process, when half a Beech landed on it, so it looks a bit weird now, with half of it missing. It is ideal however for hanging a bird feeder on. Herself likes watching them feed, as do I. Isn’t it marvellous that as we grow older how the simplest things provide amusement? I used to enjoy sending tourists up to the bogs where they would get lost, and now I’m reduced to watching birds?
Anyhows the Jackdaws discovered my feeder and wrecked it. Bastards.
A couple of weeks ago I bought two new feeders and hung them on the bird tree. There’s a small one with an outer cage to guard it and a big one with very narrow feeding slits to deter any bird with a large beak. I filled them up with seeds and sat back to wait.
Not a single dickey-bird.
The days passed and the feeders hung there without a single customer.
Then one day last week I was idly looking out the window thinking sad thoughts of Grandsons when there was a sudden burst of activity in the garden. About twenty sparrows arrived, all at once from nowhere and descended on the feeders. It’s the first time I have seen a sparrow here and now suddenly the bird tree is full of them.
They went into a feeding frenzy which was great fun to watch. They would queue up on the branches and shove each other off to get better placings, a bit like a queue in the Post Office. If they got impatient [which was all the time] they’d attack the birds on the feeders so there were constant battles and a hell of a racket. Soon other makes and models of birds arrived and swelled the ranks and I had to refill the feeders. The frenzy continued unabated.
Then I noticed one bird. He wasn’t like the others and was a lot bigger for a start. He had striking plumage but the one remarkable feature was that he was perched on a vertical branch and not the usual preference of a horizontal one. He completely ignored all the mayhem surrounding him. As I watched, he took a few tentative pecks at this branch and immediately I knew what he was – a woodpecker!
I have only seen one once before and that was in France, in the distance. I had never seen nor heard one in Ireland. I checked on line and sure enough he was a Great Spotted Woodpecker. I watched him for a while as he tried a few other branches and then I went to grab a camera but when I got back he was gone.
This was something remarkable. They are very rare in Ireland and have only started arriving in the last ten years or so. We were honoured.
I haven’t seen him since. And strangely, we haven’t been visited by the sparrows either. The feeders are out there virtually untouched with only the occasional visitor.
That one day at the bird tree was somewhat surreal.
Lovely birds to see feeding, I feed sunflower kernels to mine as htey seem to be fussy about food. The one in the pic is a she – Males have a red cap on the top of their head!
Cheers
The bird I saw had the red cap but otherwise was the same as the photo.
I have sunflower seeds in the small caged feeder and ordinary seeds [and insects?!] in the large one. The big feeder seems to attract more birds but the small one empties quicker. I haven’t worked out yet how that works.
I no longer put out seeds as the little darlings spill so much that the ground below gets great clumps of green sprouting everywhere. Instead we have syrup feeders, 3 of them and it is interesting that the bigger birds like Tuis(think Blackbird with a white bib) arrive first and push everything else out of the way.Then we get the Silvereyes ,30 or 40 at a time,squabbling over who gets in first.By 11 o clock,all the feeders are empty and that is another 3 litres of syrup gone.I dont refill them until evening as they would keep going all day and cost too much in sugar. In the summer all the Sivereyes diperse into the bush and will not be really seen again until next autumn.
Syrup? I haven’t heard that one before. It sounds sticky. You realise you’ll have the Nanny Police on your doorstep claiming you’re responsible for Avian Obesity?
Sorry, should have explained that I am in the South Island of New Zealand where there are several nectar feeding birds.We dont get the birdsong like the British Isles and I sometimes miss it.
That would explain it all right. I miss those little flags that told me where my visitors came from! Birdsong is one of the great joys living here. Springtime is a riot of song in the air.
Our year has taken a similar turn (except Disney free). We love to sit in the conservatory and watch the birds as they queue up in the bushes and on the arms of our feeder stand and then push and squabble to get the seeds. We have some sparrows now, after an almost total loss of them a few years back but there are fewer bluetits and long tailed tits this year than there were when sparrows were scarce. They seem to be cyclic in populations? Loads of blackbirds this year, a few thrushes, and we have attracted swarms of goldfinches since we put up a niger seed feeder a couple of years back, if you haven’t one you might like to try, they are quite pretty with the red lined face and yellow/gold wing flashes and almost capable of hovering. We also have a pair of woodpeckers (the more common type) somewhere close by, we see them ocassionally on the peanut feeder and a pair of partridges plus baby wander past most days.
It’s funny about the sparrows. My memories of childhood are of constant chirping from sparrows in the hedges and starlings. They were the only types I remember seeing apart from the odd seagull flying high.
Another flock arrived here this afternoon. The fighting amongst them would put a cage fighter to shame. There was one idiot too who stood on a near branch and pecked at the plastic seed container. It never seemed to dawn on him that he wasn’t actually getting seeds. Great fun.
Yes sparows and starlings were the most common garden visitors when I was growing up. There must be loads of starlings around because we sometimes get massive murmerations over the nearby fields but I never see them in the garden nowadays, odd.