My desk (and computer) stand just inside a ground floor window, with, only a few feet outside, our bird feeders hanging on the branches of a tree. The tree provides safe cover for a multitude of garden birds, and we keep the feeders stocked with peanuts and fat balls.
We don't attract any rare or unusual species, but the feeders are extremely busy, and our visitor list is quite long. I'm not a twitcher, so may miss a few, but at various times of the year, in the garden, we see:
- house sparrow
- dunnock
- wren
- starling
- blackbird
- song thrush
- chaffinch
- greenfinch
- goldfinch
- blue tit
- great tit
- coal tit
- robin
- siskin
- blackcap
- wagtail
- collared dove
- rock dove
Locally, but almost never in the garden, other birds we often see include:
- meadow pipit
- sedge warbler
- wheatear
- redwing
- mistle thrush
- swallow
- cuckoo
- snipe
- curlew
- lapwing
- heron
- jackdaw
- hooded crow
- raven
- buzzard
- sparrowhawk
- various seabirds (I'm not good at identifying seabirds...)!
...and very occasionally a golden eagle or sea eagle will overfly. Just a couple of times, I have seen a hen harrier over the Roskhill moorland.
Now as for nesting birds - our garden has a number of shrubs and trees. Then we have two nest boxes which are favoured by great tits, and the Barn has various holes and gaps in the roof and soffits. These locations all provide good homes, and this year in particular we have been delighted to see a big increase in numbers of breeding house sparrows. The starlings, blackbirds and great tits have been very successful too, and the robins have done especially well (three different families managed to tolerate each other to bring off broods at the same time).
It is not difficult to spend too much time looking out of the window...
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| Just one on this occasion - a blue tit. Often there are at least half a dozen birds at this feeder at the same time. |
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