Monday 3 December 2012

03/12: WHO'S THE TEA LEAF?

Tea Leaf is the Cockney Rhyming Slang for THIEF!

Saturday afternoon we hung two of these on our apple tree:


Yummy .... the Blue Tits and the Great Tits loved them!



Yesterday morning (Sunday) one of the 'bells' had disappeared ... not a trace of it, or the wire hanger, anywhere in the garden.  Now these little birds couldn't have carried one off ... so I suspected the squirrels.

But .... the squirrels showed absolutely no interest in the other bell, which may have just been a ploy to evade suspicion of course!    They did raid just about every other fatball, nut and sunflower seed holder though.

Last night we still had one 'bell' feeder left.     This morning it was gone.  As with the first one, there is no part of it in the garden and we didn't see the going of it.  Admittedly we get up a couple of hours later than the birds and squirrels but the thief obviously goes about his dasterdly deeds very early

The squirrel is still No. 1 suspect - which set me to thinking about a cartoon I remember from my (early) childhood :-)      Who else will admit to watching Secret Squirrel in the 60s?



There is one feeder which remains squirrel proof (for now) and that contains Niger seeds which I'm very pleased to say has attracted Goldfinches to our garden (first year since we moved here). 



and yesterday the Jay spent a long time in the garden.  The grass is getting long and he seems to enjoy 'rootling' around better now ... that and the fact that there are lots of crumbs being dropped from the fatballs/seedfeeders at the moment so he's hoovering them all up I guess.

Quite ferocious looking aren't they ... but also very timid it seems



4 comments:

  1. I think the Squirrel is the guilty party too. One has moved in here recently, and went around burying all the conkers off my tree, but now that they have gone it's onto the bird feeders. I bought a large new one so I didn't have to keep filling it up and it was demolished in a day, the perches were chewed the seed holes were ripped to make them bigger and he eats all the fat balls within the day....I hope he has a stomach ache Grrrrr the Poor birds don't get a look in. My neighbour puts out niger seeds and the squirrel leaves them alone, so I guess they are not popular amongst the squirrel fraternity

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  2. You've got to have a visiting raccoon LOL. Isn't it odd that the squirrels showed no interest in the bells during the day though.

    Lovely pictures. British goldfinches don't look the same as the ones we see here, we too used to get them on our niger seed feeders in North Carolina.

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  3. We've had 2 horse chestnut (conker) trees removed from our garden recently but I'm constantly digging out mini horse chestnut trees growing from conkers buried by squirrels. Why don't they remember where they buried these things???!!!

    We also had to have our Kentish Cobnut trees/shrubs taken out. We never got to enjoy the nuts as the minute they ripened the squirrels stripped the shrubs.

    The cobs have been relocated on a site where the owner is much better equipped to protect the nuts against squirrel raids which we're pleased about as Kentish Cobs are quite a delicacy and (like many of our local products) in decline

    Hi JO
    I'm pretty certain we don't have a racoon - although stranger things have been known to happen.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The jay is lovely and great to see the goldfinches too...I think it may be a squirrel thief of your bells but confess my last one was a big crow who flew in and carried off every fat ball I put up...until I got a container ;)

    ReplyDelete

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