Birdlife

The level of noise in the garden is tremendous at the moment all coming from birds.  There are fledglings cheeping, sparrows chirping, great tits see-sawing and robins, wrens and blackbirds singing their hearts out. Not to mention the cawing of the crow which has taken to flying back and forth across the garden from a favourite roof top to where it has built its new nest. 

Crow in the apple tree

Then there's the harsh noise the magpies make and the squawks of the parakeets. 

Camouflaged parakeet

                                                                                                                                                                                             

Strutting magpie

 A lesser spotted woodpecker has visited the apple tree several times and  the swifts arrived at the beginning of this week all the way from Africa.  

Sparrow on an olive branch

When I moved in here 32 years ago, there were sparrows, dunnocks and starlings. Gradually, these all disappeared and I missed them. Three or four years ago a couple of sparrows appeared and now there's a whole community congregating in the golden privet and now all over the garden. Apparently one of the things thought to have threatened them was diesel fumes so perhaps their return coincided with less diesel being used?  This year for the first time, some starlings have arrived. I'm just waiting for the dunnock to return now. 

Starling on the golden privet

There also used to be a local owl, which was occasionally mobbed by a motley crowd of small birds but, sadly I'm afraid we are owl-less now. . 

There's a holly tree completely jungled up with ivy in my neighbour's garden at the far end of mine and that's a haven for all sorts of birds to nest in.  

Birds in the ivy

The tits are great gardeners. The blue tit particularly gobbles up aphids from all the trees and shrubs very efficiently. There are blue, great and willow tits in the garden and it is visited from time to time by a bevy of long-tailed tits which like to travel in company. 

Starlings are also  gardeners in that they go for slugs and snails with hungry ferocity. I saw one yesterday shaking a poor snail to bits trying to get it out of its shell.