garden birds

This weekend is the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch.  I won't be taking part, because I'm working.

There are a good lot of birds in the garden.  There were at least three blackbirds' nests last year, in different hedges.  Thrushes, though, far from singing out from every bush are rare sightings nowadays.  When I was a child in Devon forty years ago song thrushes were as common as blackbirds and I remember watching them beating snails out of their shells on the stone edges to the flower beds, but now it is a thrill to see the odd one.  I see mistle thrushes occasionally, but no more than that.  They are leggier and specklier and more difficult to mistake for a blackbird.

The robins are bold, trying to defend the bird table against all comers and following me around when I'm doing anything to disturb the soil.  There is the odd hedge sparrow on the bird table, but they seem to live mainly down the lane opposite the neighbours' house.  At this time of year a day doesn't pass I don't see great tits and blue tits.  They are busy on the bird table now, but do their bit through the summer picking the aphids off the roses.  There are long tailed tits, that charge around in a gang making high pitched staccato shrieks.  They look like bouncing feathery golf balls with long tails.  Last winter in the coldest spell coal tits came to the bird table, but not this year.  They are shy creatures that normally shun the garden, so either they were not hungry enough to venture out of the wood, or they have not survived.

There are generally some chaffinches about, but I haven't seen many big finch flocks this year.  Gold finches have visited in the past, though I don't think they're around permanently.

We very ocassionally see wrens creeping about.  I hope they are still with us.  There is plenty of shrubby ivy for them to hide in, so I'm optimistic.

There are two collared doves.  They are indeed a devoted and lovely-dovey pair.  I like them better than the pigeons.  The way pigeons sit in the trees and flap annoys me unreasonably, and their endless irritating cooing in May makes me think of school exams even after all these years.  I'm not crazy on the pheasants either, because they eat the fritillaries, and because they roost outside the bedroom then squawk loudly in the middle of the night, presumably when alarmed by the fox.

The starlings are just as noisy and I love them.  They nested for years in the roof above the bedroom, and made an amazing amount of noise, banging on the ceiling in the small hours, and hurling lumps of insulation out through the hole in the soffit board.  For years I argued that they should be allowed to stay despite the noise.  Then they began to travel further afield in the roof, and down inside the walls.  Sitting in the study on winter evenings we would hear desperate scrabbling from under the plasterwork.  It was all getting too Edgar Allen Poe, and reluctantly I agreed that before the nesting season started their hole would have to be blocked.  We put up two purpose built starling boxes on the wall, but I'm afraid they haven't taken to these.  They still sit on the telephone wires in the mornings, making whistling noises.  Years ago there used to be one that did a convincing telephone imitation, and one that did an owl, confusing when you heard it on the roof in the middle of the day.

There are tawny owls, and they do call by day for parts of the year, though not from the roof.  We often hear them, seldom see them.  I'm sure they nest in the wood.  Sometimes in the summer you hear the small birds mobbing one.  There are kestrels, which I think nest in the wood.  Buzzards now live in this area, and have flown through the airspace above the garden, but I don't think one has ever touched down, so they don't count.  I deduce the presence of sparrowhawks from the piles of pigeon feathers that appear on the grass now and then.  I once as a child saw a sparrowhawk pluck its prey, screaming all the while as it pulled the feathers out.

I often see green woodpeckers.  They forage on the lawn, which is a very good reason for not dosing the grass with chemicals to kill leatherjackets etc.  I'd far rather have the yaffles.  They have red heads, a dipping flight and a thoroughly dirty laugh.  We hear drumming very infrequently, which is the spotted ones, as green ones don't drum.

There are magpies, and jays.  Nobody gets excited or pleased to see them, though they are handsome birds.  I find acorns and chestnuts in all sorts of odd places, and presume I can thank the jays for the fact that I have a regular supply of evergreen oak seedlings coming up in the garden, though the nearest Quercus ilex is across three fields.  There are black corvids, but I have never worked out whether rooks or crows.  I will read up on them one of these days.

In the summer house martins and swallows hunt over the garden.  On a hot evening you can see the insects.  House martins nest on our neighbours' house, but have never favoured us.

And those are the birds, but whether they are more or less abundant this year than last I couldn't say, having not done the Birdwatch.  It must be useful to try and keep track of whether numbers are rising or falling, but frustrating to spend your hour watching and at the end of it have not recorded a tenth of the species you know are there, or were yesterday.