Bramblings in the Snow

The snow in my garden on Thursday morning was three feet deep and the most convenient way for me to feed the birds was to place small portions of their favourite foods along the top of the wall at my front door.

From my living room window I watched three male Bramblings, a large mixed flock of Chaffinch, four Greenfinch, a female House Sparrow, three male and two female Blackbirds, individual Blue, Coal and Great Tits and a Robin visit the food. As might be imagined, I was particularly pleased to see the Bramblings. I think this is a first winter male ...

Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla)

Hard Times

Since the weekend, the winter weather, which was at least picturesque in my last my last piece, has continued to tighten it's grip on Redesdale. The accumulation now is certainly as deep as last winter and clearing it has meant a lot of hard work for me and my new plastic snow shovel. The car-wide track down to the road, created on Saturday when I dug out the six inches of snow lying on my drive, has filled and been cleared twice again; on Monday the snow was twelve inches deep and there was another six inches yesterday. And if I felt up to the task this morning, five inches more has fallen overnight. It's still snowing heavily as I write so I've voted for a lazy day. Sadly, the garden birds will not be able to relax.

Garden Birds

It's five and a half years since I moved to the Rede valley and, coming here from a small house with an almost birdless back-yard garden in the suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne, it has always been a pleasure, and sometimes a great surprise, to watch the various birds that visit or fly over my garden. I am lucky here to have a small mixed wooded area immediately in front of the house which includes white poplars and Scots pine and provides cover for the birds when visiting the feeders.

Very occasionally, a new bird is added to the list; the stars this year have been the Redpolls that appeared out of the blue on the first day I put up my new nyjer seed feeder in late February. Long-tailed tits also found, but seem subsequently to have forgotten their way to the garden this year. It's not a very large list, some 40 species at most, but when the weather or something else stops me from going out, they all help brighten the day.

The list includes the males, females and young of most but not all of the following: Greenfinch, Goldfinch and Chaffinch; Brambling, Siskin and Redpoll; Coal, Blue, Great and Long-tailed tits; Blackbird, Song Thrush and Fieldfare; Reed Bunting and House Sparrow; Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff; Pied Wagtail, Wren, Robin, Dunnock and Nuthatch; Great Spotted Woodpecker and Tree Creeper; Tawny Owl and Sparrow Hawk; Rook, Carrion Crow and Jackdaw; Starling and Pheasant with Heron, Swallow, House Martin, Swift and Buzzard flying overhead.

Greenfinch (Carduelis chloris)

Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

Blue Tit (Parus caeruleus)

Pied Wagtail (Motacilla alba)

Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)

Tuppence a Bag

It's a long time since you could feed the birds for tuppence a bag. These days, the supply of wild bird food is big business and the food itself comes in 20kg sacks with prices to match. And there's more: We lovingly provide our feathered friends with somewhere to perch, drink and bathe, often much better facilities than they enjoy in their own homes, and there are feeders especially designed for almost every kind of bird food you can imagine (well if you supply the food, why not create special feeders in which to serve it).

I bought my friend Sandra a bird feeder for her birthday last December. It was a small, yellow, wooden house enclosing a house-shaped cake of bird food. She loved it of course, and placed it near her kitchen window so she could watch the birds when she was washing the dishes. I think it was the sight of a nuthatch feeding that initially captured her attention and which led her one day to buy another feeder, and then another, until now she has quite a collection. And all of the time, she is attracting more species into her garden. Her excitement was dangerously infectious when we last spoke, to arrange a birdwatching day out as you might expect, and we spent as much time comparing notes about the birds that visit our respective gardens as a pair of thirteen-year-olds might about the boy next door.

And yet, this doesn't stop us from wanting the best we can afford for the birds we welcome into our gardens, and not least because of the pure, old-fashioned, pleasure they provide. Long may it continue.

Hard times for this Blue Tit (Parus caeruleus): Winter feeding is particularly important

Nuthatch (Sitta europaea)

Siskin (Carduelis spinus)