‘Don’t throw that away! It will do for my birds.’ Never a scrap of bread, a sliver of meat, tired rice, or cold porage is allowed to be put in the bin or the compost – it must be re-cycled and ground up nicely for the birds of Bloxham, who will no doubt soon to be too fat to fly at the rate they dispose of our offerings.
It started with my husband’s love affair with starlings, because they are such handsome, amusing quarrelsome birds, but it now covers a wide spectrum from the smallest up to some of the largest. This has required the construction of an evergrowing number of ‘branches’ on our feeder tree, to take the many and varied feeders. Every inch of fence and pergola has hooks and brackets to take fat balls, peanut cakes, birdbaths, nijer seed, not to mention sunflower hearts, oat flakes, breadcrumbs and corn nibbles.
Just scattering left overs on the lawn will not do – too many large birds swoop in to take advantage. Jackdaws, pigeons, doves, crows can hoover up everything in a trice. So first a special netted cage was constructed to allow starling-size birds to eat in safety while the jackdaws prowled frustratedly round the edges, and then a second protective cage was provided to let the little ground feeders such as dunnocks and chaffinchs to eat without starling interference. This cage is also taken advantage of by a mouse which pops in and out from under the honeysuckle.
The starlings soon learnt to take from the hanging feeders, but still leave plenty for the gold and greenfinchs, and the tits fly back and forth to the seed and to the suet and insect candle, when the bigger birds are not around. This ‘candle’ hangs from a 2 ft string suspended from a bracket, and we were much intrigued to watch a crow perch on the bracket, carefully use one claw to haul up the string till the candle was just below his perch, when he stood firmly on the coiled up string and set to work in earnest to devour the suet. Occasionally a spotted woodpecker runs up the untreated wooden pole in search of insects, and if there is a pigeon sitting on the top, he will often impertinently goose it, much to our amusement. Jackdaws have learnt, though rather clumsily, to hang on to the container for fat balls, and make free with them, while the white doves hang around underneath to catch the bits that fall. Our most surprising bird, though was the rook, a bird with a massive beak, who appeared on a couple of days, but obviously decided that he was rather out of place, or perhaps the food was not up to his standard, and he has not been back recently.
Our birds give us tremendous pleasure, and I can thoroughly recommend the placing of a few feeders to give you hours of entertainment, not to mention being able to use every bit of food that gets left on the plates. CMC