Chiltern Birder

I glanced out of the window this morning and saw a bird on the feeder with plumage that I didn't recognise. It was clearly a finch but the angle meant that I couldn't see details. Watching for a couple of minutes the way it kept looking around seemed very familiar and a quick check in a field guide confirmed my suspicion that the semi-resident pair of bullfinches had raised a brood and at least one had survived.

In recent weeks the garden has been almost devoid of birds. The resident pair of wood pigeons have been munching their way through the fat bars on the starling feeder while a magpie makes occasional attacks on the fat balls on a hanging feeder. Hardly anything has been taking sunflower seeds, so much so that I had to clean out the existing seeds as they had become caked at the bottom. Yesterday, however, a pair of bullfinches appeared and spent some time there. It was striking how faded the cock bird had become, nothing like the vivid brick red of the spring. In the front garden the rowan tree is laden with berries, the branches so heave that I bumped my head on one bunch. It was very noticeable that it had only recently stopped raining! I am sure that the tree will be stripped bare soon enough but if previous years are anything to go by I am unlikely to to see a single bird feeding on it.