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Garden Diary
In preparation for the Big Garden
Birdwatch (Saturday and Sunday the 28th and 29th of January) we've prepared a video diary of some of the birds we have seen in our garden. As well as a record of what we saw, hopefully you can take some inspiration from this for ways in which you can help keep the birds fit and well in Winter.
The rules of this diary:
- All of this footage have been taken with an ordinary digital camcorder. We managed to find one with a 25x optical zoom so that it would be able to take bird footage more easily, but otherwise it's no more powerful or expensive than any other family camcorder.
- Everything was taken out of the windows of our house - the kitchen, the back bedroom, and one section was taken hanging out of the small bathroom window!
- We were going to restrict the time limit to about 24 hours (around the 27th or 28th of December 2005), but it's more like a day and a half so that we could get one nighttime shot in particular, a main day, and some clearer shots from the next morning.
You can see all of the footage captured on another page.
Our Garden
We have a pretty typical suburban garden - that is to say, small. There's a patch of grass, a shed, and a fish pond - no grand lawns, shrubs in the shape of peacocks, avenues of trees, statues or lakes! We are lucky to have a thin strip of grass behind the back fence with the odd tree dotted around, thanks to a nearby school, but in general we've had to make the best of the garden we've got. This means that a buddleia bush, planted to attract butterflies in the summer (and often found growing "wild" out of old brickwork and demolition sites), has been allowed to grow quite large so that we've got somewhere to hang the bird feeders. There's also ivy and honeysuckle growing around the shed - the ivy in particular is in danger of swallowing not only our shed, but also a good portion of the neightbour's garden, which is not bad for something grown from a single strand pinched from a nearby wood a few years ago.
It's also worth pointing out that birds feel safer when there's cover for them to hide in. A lot of birds around our garden start out flying between the trees behind the fence; they then fly in to the Buddleia bush, and wait until they feel safe enough to try for some food; perhaps retire deeper into the bush to eat a particularly large seed or wipe off any excess fat; and then fly to the nearest cover if they are threatened. The ivy and honeysuckle are usually teeming with sparrows, and occasionally blue tits, great tits, wrens, and blackcaps. The buddleia also has to have quite a few branches left on it for perching: it's not enough to just have a few strong branches to hold the seed feeders (with the weight of the food and a couple of birds added on), it seems there have to be smaller branches nearby for birds to queue or hide!
Berry feeders
We didn't know that the ivy would, when mature, be covered in berries, so it's more by luck than judgement that we have such a good habitat for birds that like berries. As you can see from the footage below, we have several blackbirds feeding from this. We had heard of Blackcaps also feeding on ivy berries, but this doesn't seem to be the case in our garden. They do, however, seem to use it for shelter: they're nervous birds so tend to fly off if frightened, but often use cover to shelter from the rain.
Blackcaps are members of the warbler family, and so really should have flown south for the Winter. However, in recent years blackcaps in particular seem to stick around - although they might be different birds from the ones we see in Summer, possibly having flown from somewhere like Germany to enjoy our milder climate. This year we've been fortunate enough to be visited by both a male and a female, so perhaps time will tell if this pair stick around.
Many birds in winter eat berries - as well as the ones above, thrushes (song thrush, mistle thrush, redwing and fieldfare) seek out the ornamental orange berries you often get on bushes and trees. If you have children be aware that these can be poisonous: a small tree would be better than a low shrub. We don't have any of these in our back garden, but there are many close by: in front of the supermarket, around factory and workshop units, behind the library and in the local chruch yard. These have attracted waxwings in the past: usually a relatively rare bird, but in the past couple of years these have come over from Scandinavia in large flocks, hitting Scotland first and moving south as the food runs out. Last we heard they were in Leeds, so if you have berry bushes or trees, look out for these beautiful birds in the coming weeks!
Feeding stations
Over the years we've tried a number of different types of feeders with various different foods, with varied success.
Seed feeders with a standard wild bird mix keep the sparrows happy, and occassionally the blue and great tits. We have a number of these, and get through quite a bit of seed! A lot of it seems to end up on the floor, but this just means we don't need to put too much down for the ground feeders.
However, much more successful for the variety of birds have been the more recent addition of the sunflower hearts (sunflower seeds, but without the messy shells): these are much prefered by blue and great tits, blackcaps, goldfinches, even robins (and squirrels). The sparrows will take these, but not as much as the regular seed. Our feeder is orange, with large openings on four sides; the perches seemed a little flimsy when we bought it, so we made our own from some strong fencing wire we found lying around.
We also have fat balls hanging up - nets containing large lumps of fat and seed. As well as the blue and great tits, blackcaps, robins and squirrels we get startlings, magpies and feral pigeons on these. The pigeons can be a bit of a nusance, but generally prefer food on the floor.
Finally for the containers there's the peanut feeders. The squirrel also gets the blame for destroying most of these - the traditional red net bag doesn't last long, and plastic feeders seem to end up broken on the floor more often than they stay in the tree. Eventually we settled on a ceremic feeder which is bolted down over a strong wire mesh - it didn't cost more than a few pennies more than the plastic version, and has the weight and construction to stay unbroken on the bush. Of course it's also a pain to refill, especially in the freezing cold, as you have to bolt the whole thing together with a wing nut and with frozen fingers this usually leads to peanuts all over the floor, but it's better than the alternative.
After Christmas we also put out the turkey carcass. We get foxes in the area so we thought they might take it, but when this didn't prove successful we hung it in the tree to see if any birds would bother with it. the City of Nottingham and surrounding suburbs has at least three birds of prey you can see regularly - kestrels, sparrowhawks, and more recently peregrine falcons. It seemed unlikely that any of these birds would bother with our little garden, but it was worth a shot. It turned out that the blackcaps seem to love this rather ghoulish meal, and then large gatherings of starlings started appearing, especially just before they went off to roost. This success means we'll probaby have to have chicken for Sunday lunch for some time to come.
We don't have a traditional bird table partly due to our wall-mounted type falling apart some time ago - although controversy rages over whether this was down to the elements or the attentions of a rather large grey squirrel. We do know from experimentation that the squirrel will eventually find a way of getting at other methods of providing bird food - but seems to hate chilli peppers. We found this out by hanging out a large seed bell usually given to parrots (bought from Newark market) in the hope that it would last longer than some of the other feeding methods. The squirrel was quite happy to nibble away at the seeds and dried fruit, but spat the chilli peppers out - much to the distress of at least one pigeon it landed on!
Ground feeders
Blackbirds and starlings seem to like the occasional apple, cut in to quarters. The birds don't seem to like them whole (hard to get through the skin) and cut in halves it's hard to see if it's an empty skin or been left untouched!
A number of other birds also prefer to eat from the floor: as well as the usual sparrows and pigeons, we've had robins, dunnocks and chaffinchs taking seed (and grubs and insects) here, often perching on benches, flower pots and the traditional spade handle to look around.
We tend not to throw bread out often, although any leftovers tend to go on the vegetable garden for the pigeons. The reason for this is that the pigeons especially seem to want to dunk the bread in water, polluting either the pond or bird bath: the bird bath especially gets filthy very quickly, so we would have to clean it every hour or so! If you do throw bread out and have water nearby such as a pond, you might want to wet it first.
Talking of water, it's very important that birds have somewhere to drink and bathe, especially during the freezing weather. We have the pond; an old plastic barrel filled with rain water hidden away; and our "bird bath", which is the lid of an old metal dustbin turned upside down and propped up with bricks. It may not be the prettiest bird bath in the world, but it's easy to clean and refill. It's right under the kitchen window so it's great for watching blackbirds having a good old bath in, and as these starlings show, a real asset in the cold weather:
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With a fall of post-Christmas snow we awoke to find a more exotic ground feeder digging for food: a green woodpecker. We saw more of this bird on the ground than we did in any tree!
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Finally (although it was the first thing we recorded with the new camcorder!) we had an even more spectacular "ground feeder" appear just as the sun was setting. Anyone laugh when we mentioned birds of prey earlier? Well, this sparrowhawk may not have fed on the turkey carcass, but was more than happy to take one of the other birds in the garden...
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Updates
Thursday 5th of January, 2006
Since writing this diary, the blackcaps have been seen much less, although whether this is because they have moved on, or pushed out by the recent arrival of goldfinches remains to be seen. Goldfinches have never come to our feeders before, despite our best efforts in the past several years; we now get them four at a time, and sometimes they bring a greenfinch along too, a bird that used to be a common visitor but hadn't been seen feeding in the garden for a while. Everywhere we go we seem to see goldfinches, so there must have been an influx from somewhere!
Monday 16th of January, 2006
We've been watching the situation closely, and today we had a new record of
11 goldfinches coming to the various feeders (including the new 6-hole jumbo
feeder for sunflower hearts). As for the blackcaps - well, the female still
comes in daily, and when she's around, she can bully the whole flock of
goldfinches right out of the garden!
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