Fledged starlings have joined their hardworking parents on an invasion of our backyard. They are noisy and demanding but they do a daily march across the lawn picking at the ant mounds exposed by our lawn mowing activities. They are learning to bathe in the trays of water we leave around and stand on the roof windmilling their little wings (exercising their shoulder muscles we guess).
A daily change of the bath water is essential - it gets dirty, sort of dusty looking, and the crows have an unusual habit of washing their food in the water troughs🤔
Speaking of crows here's a bonus crow walk....
... and a fuzzy woodpecker.
... and a fuzzy woodpecker.
This morning two woodpeckers. Woodpecker young must be growing their feeding demands, our woodpeccker friend has been operating a 'liner service' back and forth all week, several times an hour while the fatballs last, but it must have reached a stage that one can't keep up. Or maybe, one parent said to the other, 'let's both get in early before the starlings demolish the buffet'.
I ordered more bird food this week. In bulk. I thought I'd ordered 12.5kg of calci worms last autumn (and Mr B uses them to stock the buffet in the hedgehog diner too), so I ordered 12.5 kg again.
Last year's order clearly had not been 12.5kg. We have enough calci worms for East Hampshire for a month!🙄😁 Oops.
 |
| Box of 30 fat balls for context |
It's good to see them..next door (the other semi half to my home) has starlings nesting under the tiles...I hear them shouting for food...and see them doing wing practice on the gutter edge!
ReplyDeleteCrows washing food.. interesting...so do we....and raccoons...I wonder just how many others?
Dolphins?
DeleteMy, your birds are spoilt and spreading the word far and wide. I love the crow walk - such funny birds, though not quite so much when they're stealing eggs and young birds.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they aren't such predators when they have an easy supply of food. We were always told that if we encouraged crows we'd have no small birds. It hasn't proven to be true.
DeleteCrows are quite comical when they strut around in that lopsided way.
ReplyDeleteI have never seen them washing their food . How unusual.
Years ago in Southwark Park, I spotted a crow doing that with chips it had scavenged out of a discarded fish diner, dipping them in a puddle. I thought it was softening the chips, but I have seen our crows regularly dipping their food here in the water troughs - even dropping it in and retrieving it.
Deletethat is a lot of crows and starlings! love the strut of the crow... we don't have them in our yard, but see them when we walk. the grackles have taken over our yard. I assume they are eating ants, they run all over pecking in and under the grass/leaves. will see what they do with the banana peels. I am throwing a couple out to try it. they love apples and per the internet love orange and banana peels..
ReplyDeleteHari Om
ReplyDeleteAwww little darlings... Now if they would just honour the host with a murmuration! And perhaps it was 2.5kg...? Still, with all those mouths... YAM xx