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The Birds — 9 Comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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