Celebrating the weather

I've been told by nature programmes (I'm looking at you Springwatch) that by feeding birds when times are hard I'll get unusual species coming into my garden to take advantage when natural stocks are low. Now I'm not expecting to be swamped with Crossbills or to have to clear the patio of Corn Buntings whenever I want to leave the house, but a bit of variety wouldn't go a miss.

It's time for the back story. I feed the birds all year round. And I feed them such an array of stuff that my bird food cupboard wouldn't look out of place in an RSPB gift shop with an extortionate price tag attatched to it. There's sunflower hearts, seed mix, niger seed, peanuts, suet blocks and occasionally meal worms. And with such a vast spread, you'd assume I'd be inundated with as many birds as you'd find in the Panamanian rainforest. You'd be wrong.

For the ornithological diversity of my garden consists more or less entirely of House Sparrows. House Sparrows on the peanuts, House Sparrows on the seed mix and House Sparrows on the sunflower hearts. Now I love a House Sparrow as much as the next man, probably more than the next man, but there's only so much House Sparrow a man can take before his eyes begin to wander.
I gaze enviously at gardens filled with Great Tits and Chaffinches, day dream about Siskins and Long-tailed Tits and fantasize at the thought of Nuthatch and Greenfinches. And the things I'd do for a Great Spotted Woodpecker...

The only time the House Sparrow party is interrupted is when the constantly chattering Sparrows aren't deemed loud enough by the neighbourhood Starlings. The Starling flocks make the House Sparrow gatherings look like a sponsored silence. Suet blocks are brutally assaulted, peanuts decimated and whole dishes of meal worms scoffed in a blur of yellow beaks and noise.

This is the situation in general. There's still the Robin who drops in everyday, the odd Blue Tit pair and the Blackbirds. After putting out niger seed for a couple of weeks, I even managed to turn Goldfinches into a fairly frequent visitor but even through the toughest of winter's I've only ever had one Tree Sparrow and a Chaffinch.

However as the snow fell over the past week and the UK was plunged back into winter's icy grip, I began to notice a change in the visitors to the garden. It started with a single Lesser Redpoll on the the niger seed feeder one morning. Over the coming days it kept returning and was eventually joined by two more. It turns out that Lesser Redpolls are becoming far more common visitors to gardens as they begin to take advantage of the niger seed on offer, and I for one hope that we'll be seeing them as readily as Goldfinches in the coming years. They were great little birds to watch, and the trio continued to visit over the next week or so. Little did I know that this was just the gathering garden bird storm. A couple of days later they were joined by a flock of Long-tails on the peanuts as snow continued to fall.

Then, whilst sat at the kitchen table a few days later, I happened to notice a Wren on one of my frequent staring sessions outside to distract myself from University work. A top little bird and an unusual visitor to my garden but as it wasn't using the feeders I couldn't really claim to have wooed it with the promise of a bird feed buffet. A pair of Great Tits then caught my eye (not in that way), followed by a Coal Tit that kept grabbing a seed and flitting back into the elder. All very lovely and entertaining but then came a garden bird A-lister (for my garden anyway). A Marsh Tit. The excitement was so great that any University work immediately had to be put off for a further week. Marsh Tit populations have been declining, particularly in my area where we are catching less and less birds when ringing. On top of that, I've never seen them anywhere near the garden at all at any point in my life so this really was a cracking sighting.

Fast forward a week and the snow is disappearing and all but gone entirely from the garden. The weathers warmed up (we almost hit 8 degrees today....8!) and balance has been restored to my garden bird population. But that's OK. In these times of Starling and House Sparrow declines, its good to have such healthy numbers visit the garden. We get both species regularly nesting in the roof and I recently put up a House Sparrow nest box to encourage more of them to breed here. It's important to help them in any way we can, especially as their nest sites begin to disappear under newly tiled roofs.

Besides, apart from being nice to watch in their own right,

Sparrows feed Sparrowhawks.

And I do love a good Sparrowhawk.