No doubt, it was the title that got your interest. So you, and the birds in our new garden, have at least one thing in common, you’re interested in offers of free food.
Since we moved, to the highlands, trying to actually get out and take, photographs has been almost impossible. Setting up our house, office and business is taking most if not all of our time. We wake up early and before you-know-it, it’s time to go to bed. Life has become one long buying trip. If it’s not off to the shops it’s, ordering online, and then waiting in for deliveries. But, light is now visible at the end of the tunnel. And more importantly some of the recent shopping trips have been for bird food.
Providing food is a sure way of attracting wildlife into your garden. Although we now live surrounded by woodland, you rarely see birds. When we first arrived there were Pied Wagtails, Thrushes and Blackbirds on the grass. These were adult birds, teaching youngsters how to feed and as the young grew older, the number of visits to the garden diminished. Eventually everything went quite, we didn’t see many birds just the odd Wren and Blue Tit.
Things have changed, and it’s all down to “Free Food”. From day one of starting provide food for the birds, we have seen an explosion of numbers and types of birds, visiting our garden. First day, we had four species of Tit, Great, Coal, Blue and Long Tailed. They are if you like the pathfinders. In order to find food in the wild they have to be curious. Insects as a diet is difficult to find, if you watch Tits feeding naturally you will see them looking in every crevice in a tree to find food.
Once Tits had established our garden as a source of food, other birds and animals have followed and started to visit the garden. Slowly over the last 7-10 days the number of species visiting has increased. As well as Tits we have added to a garden list things like Siskin, Great Spotted Woodpecker and Treecreeper.
Treecreeper Certhia familiaris
As well as increasing the species of birds we are seeing, the mammals have also been more evident with free food on offer. Ranging from, four young and very small Bank Voles, to a mystery nocturnal visitor. As yet, we haven’t been able to identify our night caller, although we do have a theory as to the identity. So far, every peanut we leave out disappears and all we are, left with is a lack of peanuts and a series of small holes in our grass. Time for the trail camera, to catch the guilty in the act, we will post, when we find out the culprit’s identity.
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[…] garden is now full of birds, since we started to put out food. But you may remember from our last post , we started feeding and getting night-time visitors, who were digging up the grass. So in order […]