Birds in the garden

[Sajehar]

Scally, that's a brill photo. More importantly, your stuff about pensions has helped a mate of mine.
She had recently taken a job at NMW for 12 hours a week. But after a 3 month probationary period they put their wages up. This would've put her over the £100 limit, just!
I showed her your post, wherever it is, and now she has pension for less than a fiver a month witch puts her below that limit.
Sunflower says many thanks to you.. she doesn't have internet.

[susieq]

She-Wolf - we have a 'murder' of crows most mornings; they congregate in a large conifer tree in the garden behind mine - the noise they make is terrible I think it's them that keeping the smaller birds away I only get a couple of robins visiting the bird feeders along with a pair of blue tits and one, rather fat, pigeon

Plus which I think our resident pair of foxes have been visiting the ground feeder as, despite filling it every couple of days with dried meal worms and seeds etc specially for small birds, it gets totally cleaned out - not a scrap left

The foxes have also discovered that the roof of my new shed is a perfect place to 'sunbathe' - although not the best place to be when we get a hailstorm like we did this morning

[Scally]

Scally, that's a brill photo. More importantly, your stuff about pensions has helped a mate of mine.
She had recently taken a job at NMW for 12 hours a week. But after a 3 month probationary period they put their wages up. This would've put her over the £100 limit, just!
I showed her your post, wherever it is, and now she has pension for less than a fiver a month witch puts her below that limit.
Sunflower says many thanks to you.. she doesn't have internet.

Delighted to hear it. I suspect that hundreds of thousands of carers are losing out, and in part, this is because Charities like Carers UK want to push the poverty button and go for the sympathy vote rather than show us how to tweak the bloody stupid system to make it work. Sorry, Matt, but it had to be said.

[Sajehar]

I may not have gotten them RSPCA fat balls, but they're still eating the cheapo ones.
Can you twitchers identify a bird for me? There were loads of them.
It was like a sparrow only light golden brown on it's back, soft dove grey at it's front with a black bib at it's throat.

[david c]

it might be a tree sparrow ,which is a house sparrow in his best suit

[david c]

sajehar ,is this it?
not one of my photos

[Sajehar]

That's them. They were perched and flying around completely bare small trees/large bushes lining the railway line. There were dozens of them. They weren't colourful but their markings were very striking I thought they were very handsome looking birds. I've never seen them in our garden.
Dad bought me a huge sack of bird seed, half a hundred weight! I shall scatter seeds for these birds too as I pass them daily on the way to the shops.

[crocus]

Tree sparrows eh? They are becoming quite rare these days, so its good to hear of a large flock of them. Im sure they would enjoy the seeds.

[madeliaette]

i have some good news then - we have a group of those sparrows in our yard. They visit every day, live somewhere local, and even come on my sill to munch-once the starlings/blackbirds have been and taken the best seed. There are at least a dozen that sit on the hedge/visit the yard/live nearby.

I am somewhat sulking - as the blog-host i have used for 3/5 my blogs - orble - has stopped allowing my posts to be posted (COntinuously comes up with 'title reserved'.) Currently, the bird blog posts are the only ones getting through... so I cancelled my Yoga blog and transferred my San Francisco music blog to Blogger - where I host my other two blogs on reading/DIY.)

wood pigeons, sparrows, starlings and blackbirds in abundance... jackdaws, magpies, dove, sparrowhawk, etc in sparse amounts continuing....

[Sajehar]

Crocus, if these tree sparrows are becoming rare then you’ll be very pleased to read that there is a massive colony of them along the rail tracks. There were loads in every single tree for about 500 yards; after that the embankment stops and huge back gardens back on to the railway track instead.
They may congregate here but I don’t think they actually live in the trees as I couldn’t see any sign of nests at all.
They are a lot less skittish than bog standard sparrows; I got really close up to them and they completely ignored me. Likewise with a train hurtling past, which made one hell of a racket. I’ll take my camera with me tomorrow when I fed the ones by my parent’s house, and see if I can get a half-way decent shot of them.
From what I've noticed in the past couple of days, these tree sparrows massively outnumber normal sparrows round here. I'm sure when I was a kid normal sparrows were everywhere, now I feel privileged when I see one in our back garden.