For a variety of reasons I have only been putting out fat blocks this winter. In the recent very cold weather there has been a total lack of birds in the garden. One bright spot this morning was a wren hopping into the ivy at one corner of the back wall. This is the first wren that I have seen in the garden for quite a while. On Christmas day I had to drive over to Essex for a family visit and was lucky to get a glimpse of a fieldfare on the bushes by the Magic Roundabout in Hemel. Before Christmas I was in Thame and there were about a dozen kites over the town. The concentration of kites over inhabited areas in the snow was quite striking.
Once upon a time you could find me birding on the Thames marshes almost every weekend through the winter. For various reasons I am now seldom able to travel to good birding sites. I am lucky, however, to live in the beautiful Chiltern Hills and this blog is to document the birds that I see on my own patch.