The Birds and the Bees

We'd like to show you lots of pictures of birds we have seen and appear regularly in the garden. We'd like to, but they never stay still long enough for me to fetch my camera! But we can tell you about some of them and provide some links to the RSPB site, and maybe I'll find some pictures to illustrate the story in the future.

knabbelbabbel25
We regularly have a couple of red squirrels running around - or more often through - the garden. We call them Knabbel and Babbel after two Dutch cartoon squirrels. We have a couple of large walnut trees and each year it's a race for us to harvest some nuts before the squirrels take them all and hide them for winter forage. I find tiny walnut trees growing all over the garden where they have buried their nuts and then forgotten about them. They don't stay still long enough for me to get the camera either, but here is a picture of their Disney namesakes!

We always have lots of tits in the garden: great tits, blue tits, and willow / marsh tits (I still can't distinguish between them!), and we occasionally have a large twittering flock of long-tailed tits in the trees. There are usually nuthatches, goldcrests and firecrests, and sometimes treecreepers, always robins, chaffinches, dunnocks, greenfinches, and blackbirds, and our favourite: a wren. We have a few hanging nesting boxes under the eaves of the house and the wren often spends the night in them. During the summer there are swallows, of course, and we usually have a pair of goldfinches nesting in the garden.

Then there are the occasional visitors: we have seen green woodpeckers, greater spotted woodpeckers, and jays. A year or two ago we saw a sparrow hawk attack birds around our bird-feeder. There are often partridges and pheasants in the kitchen garden - along with deer who seem to have become almost regular visitors now, eating the bark and shoots from the young fruit trees, the leaves from the young strawberry plants and berry bushes, and leaving lots of footprints in the soft earth.