Bird Report (again)

Yesterday the activity around our feeders was quite frenzied.  At one stage we had fifteen goldfinches in our garden, the flash of yellow as they flew sometimes quite brilliant, even on a rather dull day. The great spotted woodpecker is also a brilliant arrival, of course; interestingly, yesterday as he settled on the nut feeder, the other feeders remained very much in use. Previously, I've noted that when a woodpecker is present, the other feeders are abandoned for a while. The visiting woodpecker yesterday was a male - up till now we'd only seen a female.

Visitors included two long-tailed tits, any number of chaffinches, and a busy wren. There was plenty of jackdaw activity in the trees behind us, and one did fly down to investigate the feeders, driving the other birds away as he perched there. He didn't stay long. A single cock house sparrow lingered awhile. As a child, I remember our garden being full of house sparrows; here they are rarely seen in our back garden. A decent sized flock of sparrows will more or less take over a feeding station, keeping most other birds away (or at least, that was our experience in a previous garden), but individually they don't seem to compete well. One explanation for the decline of sparrows seems to be that, as communal birds, once a colony falls below a certain size it seems to lose vigour. House sparrows were the first birds to find and use our front garden feeder, but now they are not often seen there. Tits and goldfinches, being more agile, seem able to take over.

We never see starlings in this garden, though they do fly across sometimes, and perch on the wires just down the street. They were occasional visitors in our previous place. Again, starlings were ever-present in my childhood garden. In those days we threw out scraps for the birds - bread, bits of fat from the bacon, and so forth. Perhaps today's more sophisticated feeding stations discriminate in favour of certain birds - tits, finches and so forth - to the detriment of our old sparrows. Having said that, starlings were certainly able to drive everything else off the feeding station in our previous garden, on the occasions that they appeared there, and to make effective use of the feeders, so I do wonder about their complete absence here.