Spinkyblurb

I've counted lots of fledglings this summer, it feels like it has been a good year and the parent birds have done an amazing job, so here are some figures and photos (click on them to enlarge) to celebrate it. Blue Tit fledglings exploring the trees or chasing parents! Let's start in the garden:  I always do regular bird counts in the garden and this year I decided to keep a tally of fledglings, as best I could! See the table below for peak counts of each species & estimates of total fledglings.  As you can see Blackbirds were the real stars, working so hard with a peak count of eight. It wasn't all plain sailing, as a few had feather issues which hampered their progression, and they seemed particularly dependent on my garden for mealworms. One I named Rumpy as he lost so many feathers in that area, and there was another with a weird thing going on on its throat (see photo)! It was nice to see the early broods still visiting the garden as they tu...

The days are short in January and leaves very little time for birding during the working week, but its not all gloom and doom because there's a lot going on if you just take a few minutes to look out of the window. Winter is a great time for watching birds, not only for the big spectacles out on the marshes be they salt or grazing marshes, but also for those birds that get driven by hunger into your garden at this time of year. Chris Packham described it as the "hunger gap" which starts in late January, early February and is when the birds are finding it more difficult to source a good meal in the 'wilds' beyond the garden boundaries. All sorts of species start to sneak in if you put out some treats and wait, some in quite large numbers. I had twenty-four Blackbirds, just like the nursery rhyme, in my tiny garden all at one time last February. There's a Blackcap back in my garden at the moment. Could it be the same one as last year, I like to think so. His M...