Skip to main content

Feed the Birds

Bit of a heavy frost this morning so I served up a seed and fat ball breakfast for the local birds. I stocked up on bird food the day before yesterday. They only get the cheap stuff from Wilkos, I’m afraid, but it’s better than nothing given the mess they leave on the garden furniture. Still, it is very meditative watching birdies about their business. And this year I am going to set up a proper feeding station for them rather than hanging feeders on insubstantial branches and random hooks. So far I’ve seen blue tits, great tits, wrens, chaffinches, dunnocks, house sparrows, collared doves, a robin, a nuthatch and a naughty cockerel called Tootsie chancing his wing.

Bambino and Flora are also doing some attentive bird watching...


My favourite bird to see is the nuthatch. I’d never seen one in real life until we moved here. They are very streamlined and they scoot along the ground like they are ice-skating. I tried to get a decent photo but failed, so here is one from the interwebbly...
Sometimes we get jays, another bird I’d never seen in real life. And there’s the resident sparrowhawk, too, and the woodpeckers. Goldfinches make an appearance in Spring, but Autumn really belongs to the geese. There have been A LOT of geese this last week or two, flying so low across the fields you can hear their wings whistling. When I’m in the garden I always stop to watch the geese fly over.

I do love birds. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is because they always look so busy and purposeful. Perhaps it is because they are clever and bold. Or that they bring life to the garden. Or a battlefield when you serve breakfast!

The one thing I’ve yet to see around us, which would bring unnecessarily wild excitement to my life, is an owl. We have heard one every now and then, at least we think we have. Could be a chicken practising its comedy voices.  But we’ve yet to catch sight of one, despite strategic siting of the trail cam. Perhaps we could install an owl box - we have suitable trees.

I’ve never spotted an emu, either. But I’m not installing a box for one of those.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Frosted Dawn Enigma

The decorators are in at the moment. Stairs and landing. Given my previous history of 'Hoo Ha Occurring on Stairs ' - reference the Trapped Under the Sofa Incident and the Foot Wedged Between Bookcase and Stair Rise Debacle - I thought it wise to pay for professionals to decorate the stairs and landing rather than get myself in a mix with ladder and plank combinations and achieve the Magic Three of staircase accidents. The decorators are a father and son combo who go by the  names of Craig and David. This automatically causes me entertainment. 'Came in on a Monday, prepped, filled and undercoated, back on Thursday, first top coating, by Friday finishing touches...' Okay, not as frisky or well-scanned as the original song, but you get where I'm coming from. Anyway, before they started the job Craig asked what colour I wanted for the walls. 'Same colour as the downstairs walls, please,' said I. 'Dulux Frosted Dawn.' And then white for all the woodw
2 comments
Read more

Day 1 - Decisions Are Made Beyond the Author's Control.

‘Well,’ I say, looking at the expectant faces gathered around the huge table in the Great Dining Hall of Much Malarkey Manor, ‘I didn’t think it was going to happen this year, but it is!’ There is a sharp intake of breath as everyone wonders of what I speak. I’ve been muttering about all sorts recently, and I’m not talking liquorice here either.   ‘The Much Malarkey Manor Annual and Traditional Christmas Story!’ I say, and wait for the expulsed air of relief to settle before I continue. ‘I thought we had done it all. I thought we had covered every Christmas story there was. I’ve been wracking my brains for a full two months now, trying to come up with something we haven’t done before and then it hit me! We haven’t done a version of one of the Great Christmas Films of Yore!’ ‘Your what?’ says Mrs Slocombe, who is more interested in the selection of pastries I have brought to this breakfast meeting, because that is what one does, isn’t it? Eat pastries at breakfast mee
8 comments
Read more

Launched!

  I was going to wait until tomorrow to launch the ‘Hallo Tarot!’ website, what with tomorrow being 1st July and, therefore, a nice tidy date for a beginning. But this afternoon, I became involved in a flurry of final tidy loose ends activity, and thus ended up cracking the metaphorical bottle of champagne against the ship of which I am Captain and whoosh! Off she went into the World Wide Web!  You can find it here : www.hallotarot.co.uk The blog is moving there, too, so unless things go horribly wrong, this will be the last entry here.  I hope to see you on the other side then! Let me know what you think. 
Post a Comment
Read more