In most years I only see starlings in the garden in spring and early summer when they turn out mob handed and get through half a kilo of fat in a day. In the past week, however, I have had a part of three on the fat feeders in both the front and back gardens. Another usual visit today was by a pair of greenfinches who briefly came to the sunflower seed feeder.
The feeders are all very busy now with seed being topped up daily. The dried mealworms in the ground feeder are proving popular with the blackbird and robin but the fat pellets only seem to be of interest to the magpies and wood pigeons. Despite the claims by the feed merchant the raisins are generally ignored by the birds but the badger cleans them up overnight.
A group of long tailed tits made a suprise visit at dusk today. Judging by their behaviour I suspect that they were taling a last feed of the night before roosting in my neighbours leylandii. This seems rather more attractive to birds now that old man's beard has established in it.
To complete the last week's species count we have also had blue, great and coal tits, chaffinch, goldfinch and wren. I am planning to see if I can tempt the latter with a suitably placed feeder.
At least one brood of starlings have been regular visitors to the feeder and today the fledglings got the hang of taking the food for themselves. Other broods must be less developed as adults were still taking away quantities of fat. The tits aren't so common at the moment, I don't know if this is because they have dispersed, if wild food is available or if pressure from the starlings has driven them off. Single blue tits are dropping in fairly regularly and a coal tit took fat away as well. The woodpecker seems to have become a regular visitor and still has a brood to feed. He definitely comes before the starlings in the pecking order and keeps them off the feeder until he has finished. The new feeder with perching rings is popular with the chaffinches and the goldfinches, the latter suddenly seem to prefer the high energy mix to the nyjer seed. With all this demand for feeding young ones the fat is going down very rapidly and I am putting larger quantities out on the ground t...
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