It’s still busy in the garden with a constant flurry of birds on the feeders and on the ground too. The young dunnocks hop happily about in amongst the undergrowth. We have a few young robins one of which still has his speckly juvenile coloured head, but showing a nice red chest now too. The 3 young bullfinches are growing well, and appear to be larger than their parents now.
The blackbirds are still very regular visitors to the garden, and we think that 2 pairs are on their third brood. The greenfinch and goldfinch population seems to have doubled with all their young joining in for the constant snacking at the garden cafe too. We’ve gone back to using live mealworms once again, and enjoy watching robin pop down for a quick snack, and also admire how the blackbird manages to line up so many in his beak in a neat formation before taking them back to the nest.
As well as providing as much of a natural habitat as possible for the birds to find their food in our garden, we also have several hanging feeders. We also get through a lot of sunflower seed with having so many greenfinches and goldfinches and the bullfinches too amongst many other little seed munchers. Buying it by the kilo from pet/garden stores has proved expensive and also buying buy the sack from garden centres is also costly.
After lots of Google searching and creating spreadsheets for comparisons of costs, we discovered one online retailer that appears to be alot cheaper than the rest and recently ordered a massive 22.5kg sack from www.mumspets.co.uk. Delivery of the seed was in 24 hours too. And of course the birds are happy too!
Lots of heavy rain brought a crowd to the feeders just now …
including young goldfinch …
Young bullfinch
A full feeder tray
We’ve been eagerly awaiting this moment for a couple of weeks now. We have 2 friendly male bullfinches and a female bullfinch who have been coming into the garden over the last few months, gradually getting more confident and instead of using the feeders at the end of the garden, now coming up nearer to the feeders by the house. We saw a quick glimpse this morning of a parent and the youngster, but only for a fleeting moment. This afternoon I filled up the seed in the ‘playpen’ as we now call it (a hanging mesh tray feeder which seems popular with parents to have their young sit in whilst they go on the search for food! Been widely used by the blue tit family and starlings too amongst others).
Anyway, this afternoon, in the rain, one of the parents came down for a nibble on the sunflower seeds and along with them was the young bullfinch too! Continue Reading »
The garden is as busy now it’s summer as it was over winter, with flurries of families of birds visiting now. Below are some of the photos of our younger recent visitors.
The blue tits have been especially fun to watch, practicing their skills at flying and catching bugs too. In the last couple of weeks they’ve progressed really quickly.
Couldn’t resist … one of the bigger visitors to the garden!
Blackbird family on the garden path this morning
Wonderful male bullfinch earlier today.
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