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| Borrowed from Surrey Wildlife Trust website |
I learned their name in childhood in New Zealand, never saw one in 30 years of living in UK (or Europe), and returned to flocks of them flying about the bay here. Less visible over winter (maybe they had the sense to go somewhere drier), they seem to be returning now and a couple are visiting my bird feeders.
Maybe they are camera shy - in any event any photo by me would be greatly zoomed (at the cost of crystal clarity) and still show you more garden than bird.
The seeds in the feeders are attracting (as anticipated) many many sparrows, along with lots and lots of chaffinches, and now yellowhammers.
Over winter we have also had blackbirds, dunnocks and quails. Thrushes have begun to put in an appearance again. Goldfinches are reappearing one or two occasionally (we get flocks of hundreds in summer), and I saw a Welcome Swallow a couple of days ago. Swallows self-introduced from Australia in the 1950s and have become reasonably well established in some regions.
There are many human-introduced bird species here that came from UK/Europe, some that have even developed into flocks of pest proportion in cropping districts, yet I seldom (or never) saw them in UK. Redpolls and greenfinches are also regular visitor to gardens here but unseen in our UK garden despite the range of feeders we put out.
A neighbour on the other side of the bay is going white-baiting for the next three weeks and has asked me to water his strawberry plants and fill his birdfeeder.
He feeds sugar water to the native nectar feeders right on the edge of his deck so I might be able to get a half decent photo of the big bully Tui that dominates the feeder and guards it from a tall pine tree nearby.
Had to look up "White-baiting". It sounded dodgy and I suppose it is sort of, Catching babies before they have a chance...but delicious , supposedly? I know nothing. Our birds are flying south, except for crows and gulls and few little wrens. The goldfinch are gone, Flicker have gone into hiding. Robins are going somewhere for the winter. I am jealous of your location!! I would love to fly south...far south...
ReplyDeleteCome and visit. I'll feed you some whitebait! (you have to like fish flavour)
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteSo many familiar names! Up here in the Bonny Land, I would spot pretty much all of those named at least two or three times a year, some on an almost daily basis. The wee birds are the very devil to successfully photograph though, so flittery are they! YAM xx
Scotland may still be blessed by plenty of joined up countryside. South of England is getting very 'developed'
DeleteMany familiar names there.
ReplyDeleteWe haven't seen greenfinch for quite some time. Apparently the population has been severely affected by disease, spread via contaminated bird feeders. Very sad.
I'd love to send you some - along with hedgehogs that are treated as invading pests here.
DeleteThat’s the beauty of living ‘out bush’ away from town. So many birds have moved on as suburbia took over their ‘land’
ReplyDeleteMany of our natives have learned to invade town for treats that humans put out - bird feeding is beginning to take off in a serious way if the range of equipment and feeds available is anything to go by.
Deletereading this made me think of you can't have a cat because of birds and that made me think, we had two dogs out of 6 that killed birds. It seems Scully is not a bird killer. Yay.. its a beautiful bird, and this is my first ever hearing of someone asked to feed the birds while they were on vacation....
ReplyDeleteCorrect about cats. NZ has only one native mammal - a bat. Before humans arrived, bringing animals with them, the birds here had no predators. Many are flightless and nest on the ground. They are decimated by cats, rats, possums, stoats, weasels, ferrets and yes the occasional out of control dog. We have squllions of feral cats. I might do a post about how my heart deals with the dichotomy of having lived with domestic cats all my life (and loving them) and also understanding the havoc that feral cats wreck on our native birdlife.
DeleteYou are blessed to see such a variety of birds. I've never seen a yellowhammer.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten they even existed until I saw a flock of dozens last autumn. It was you who alerted me to Dunnocks and I have been able to point them out to locals who always assumed them to be sparrows.
DeleteMy father was a great gardener and we always had a variety of birds in the trees and garden. I loved listening to the tuis and occasional bellbird. We had thrushes and blackbirds, or starlings. My sister in law recently told me about a tree of tuis they pass on their daily walk. NZ has such a wonderful variety.
ReplyDeleteWe have crows and magpies, a lot of sparrows and occasionally swallow and Robins. The fields were full of pheasants and partridge which alas seem to have disappeared
I live magpies. Strangely we don't have them here in the Sounds.
DeleteSo many introduced species do amazing well in their new “homes”.
ReplyDeleteWhere in their natural environments they’re declining.
Maybe they should capture and transport them back to their original homes to re populate and save their species from extinction.
Sounds easy but I’m sure there are issues that prevent that
Im so with you on that. Id love to send hedgehogs back to England. They are dying out there and persecuted here and I'd love to save them all and send them to where they are wanted and welcomed
DeleteWe have yellowhammers around here
ReplyDeleteI've seen one or two here but we get the green ones too
ReplyDelete