Friday 1 March 2013

01/03: ST DAVID'S DAY

How time flies, March already.    I love this month - the daffodils are about to bloom and the clocks change at the end of the month.   In England we put the clocks forward one hour and prolong the daylight - makes such a difference and means Spring/Summer will follow shortly.

My own 'St David' (hubby) had to attend a meeting early this evening and I chauffered him to and from the venue so forgot to photograph the next stage of the dog portrait in daylight .... will do that during the weekend

The garden visitors have been doing their best to distract me all day .... and I'm pleased to say that I managed to photograph the woodpecker this morning when it made a return visit to our pear tree (well I assume its the same one we saw last week)

Beautiful or what?




but I am beginning to wonder if we are overfeeding our feathered friends

Who ate all the fatballs???   just look at that tummy

might have to make the doorway larger





its a tight squeeze
There was lots of activity at the nest boxes today.   My tumble dryer is inside this shed, against the wall where the boxes hang and I was drying lots of bed linen.  I think the blue tits were enjoying the 'central heating' generated by the dryer.


the robin has learned how to balance on the fatball holder now - he's holding his stomach in here and looking quite trim


relaxed


and by the end of the afternoon ...... ready to pop!!


the Long Tailed Tits are such tiny little things ... but even they are looking very rotund at the moment




I assume the birds are all stocking up in readiness for breeding/egg laying - they'll be kept busy feeding youngsters very soon.

A few of the chaffinches have figured out how to use the seed feeders but most of them struggle - I think the perches need to be an inch or so longer.    As I showed in a previous post, some of the chaffinches have deformed legs and claws so I guess that's why they struggle to land on the feeders.   They are meant to be ground feeders anyway but it seems those who master the technique of landing on the feeder perches then maximise the visit and chomp their way through a mountain of sunflower heart seeds.

This male is particularly handsome - very bright plumage.   The chaffinches seem to be the most slimline of our bird visitors at the moment.   




this female couldn't get the hang of landing on the feeder perch.  I watched her make several attempts then she gave up and waited on the grass to pick up seeds dropped by the other birds

The females aren't as brightly coloured as the males but they are still very attractive I think


another few weeks and our hedgehogs will emerge from hibernation so we'll have evening distraction as well as daytime distraction in the garden .... never a dull moment

5 comments:

  1. Wow! Those should all be in the Birds and Bloom magazine! (I read it at my dad's house...) I especially love the little guy's rear end sticking out of the bird house! I would love to draw that. Thanks for the early glimpse of spring!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You sure get lots of feathered visitors Sue, don't know how you get any work done with all that activity happening in your garden.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I keep my camera on the window ledge in our lounge so every time I pass through I check to see what's happening at the feeders and snap away if something catches my eye.

    Katherine you are welcome to use any of the pics as ref for a drawing. If you like one in particular let me know and I may still have it in high res - although I've now got into the habit of resizing my pictures to save on storage space.

    You're so right Jo. Luckily my 'studio' faces the other way onto our front garden and we don't have bird feeders there so much less going on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. very nice shots of the woodpecker :D
    your going to look at that birdhouse one day and just see tail feathers sticking out from a stuck blue tit :p

    ReplyDelete
  5. I know Jennifer. Can't make the hole any bigger though or other birds will be able to get in and raid the nest/eggs.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for visiting my Blog. Let me know what you think :-)

I have disabled the Captcha requirement at the request of followers who find it irritating when posting comments. However to stop the subsequent flood of spam posts I can no longer accept comments from Anonymous sources.
Apologies if this is a problem
Thank you
Sue
x