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