During this harsh weather

Frank the tank

Do any of you out there feed the birds (feathered variety ) ?

I take great pleasure in doing so all year round but paticularly so in this kind of weather. I make sure there is water for them to drink and I give them all manner of stuff, bread,seeds,old mince pies, fruit (raisins etc) fat pellets. I and Mrs tank take pleasure in watching them hopping around and it's interesting to see the "pecking order" and territorial behaviour.

disgruntledgoat

We have a little table with a nut feeder adn a fat ball thingo too.. We get great tits (fnarr fnarr), blue tits, a wood pigeon, robins and a woodpecker sometimes too!

deptfordmarmoset

I live on the 4th floor so I'm a bit limited as to what I can do - and neighbours always keep food hanging outside their windows so I get a good view of the tits feeding - I even had a blue tit arrive in my living room a couple of months ago). But spotting birds while out on the bike is one of the great pleasures of cycling for me (so cycling along river valleys is absolutely nothing to do with hill avoidance, obviously. Honest!)

BTW if there are any half-serious birders on here, I spotted these waders down on the Thames on New Year's Day. I've never seen them there before. Are they stints - maybe juveniles?

Frank the tank

Over the last 10 days or so we've been visited by what seems to be a lost moorhen and he looks quite comical when he stands in the water bowl as if it's his own private lake.

Not seen him today so far though.

passout

I do although the new dog gets a lot of scraps now. I make a point of doing it when the ground is frozen.

ean

deptfordmarmoset wrote:

BTW if there are any half-serious birders on here, I spotted these waders down on the Thames on New Year's Day. I've never seen them there before. Are they stints - maybe juveniles?

Black-tailed Godwit I think but I'm not so good with waders.

pneumatic

Looking out just now, I can see two pheasants, blue tits, bullfinch?, sparrows, robins, crows, woodpigeons. For a change, no seagulls, but even so it is cacophony out there!

Mrs Pneumatic gave them some nuts yesterday. As for me, I have an irrational but primal fear of flappy creatures and keep well away.

fjellrunner

We do, especially in this weather.
So when the first snow came a couple of weeks ago we got 2 large, bright green parrots feeding in a eucalyptus out the back!
When i looked up who to call the rspb states that ring-necked parakeets are the UK's only naturalised parrots and can easily survive British winters.
Who'd have thought it?

redvee

I live in the centre of town in a first floor penthouse studio bedsit so if i was in a positiion to put food out for the smaller birds it would soon get eaten by the seagulls and feral pigeons that inhabit the city centre. My Dad and Grandparents do make up for my shortcomings though as they live further out of the city centre and can sit and watch the birds coming and going.

Fat Head

disgruntledgoat wrote:

We have a little table with a nut feeder adn a fat ball thingo too.. We get great tits (fnarr fnarr), blue tits, a wood pigeon, robins and a woodpecker sometimes too!

ditto although not seen a woodpecker.

the wood pigeons look good enough to eat :twisted:

beverick

Yup, we have three mixed seed feeding stations, two peanut and one 'fat feeder' in the trees and two on the floor stocked with mixed seed, dried fruit and mealworms. I've also been putting apples out during the cold weather. There are two water bowls to keep ice free.

Over the weekend we've also been putting food out on an evening for a juvenile hedgehog that doesn't have sufficient mass to hibernate.

Bob

snakehips

It's taters out there this morning. I have just been out with some seed , bread and fresh water. The water in the dish was frozen solid , suggesting a lower temp than normal.

Snake

My Library

Stone Glider

Mrs SG advised me that an elaborate feeding station was required as a Xmas present this year to replace the bird table. Duly delivered and assembled, not installed as the ground is too hard :oops: :oops:

The current arrangement is heavily laden with fat balls, fat block, seed feeders and granary bread though. We get plenty of birds including a pair of ring doves, wood pigeons, starlings, sparrows, wrens, robins and tits of sundry varieties. We also get the occasional visit from the sparrow hawk All part of the pattern I suppose.

Stewie Griffin

We have quite a few feeders and get blue tits, great tits, robins, blackbirds, starlings, house sparrows, tree sparrows, green finches, great spotted woodpeckers, kestrel* and the newest visitor to a small garden in NW London are redwings which I had to look up as I had not seen them before**.

*The Kestrel wasnt in the garden but was in our airspace so to speak

**Im not a twitcher or anything :oops: .

Le Commentateur

Yes.

So far since buying the feeders last year they have attracted blue tits, sparrows, some sort of greenfinch (?) and an almost tame robin (it will approach to about a metre from me). Also foraging about for dropped seeds and crumbs are wood pigeons, blackbirds, a woodpecker, green parakeets (there's hundreds of them on SE London) starlings and a few urban grey pigeons.

Less welcome are a couple of hefty squirrels that raid the feeders, though the neighbours cats do a good job of keeping them at a distance.

Ands

Le Commentateur wrote:

Less welcome are a couple of hefty squirrels that raid the feeders, though the neighbours cats do a good job of keeping them at a distance.

Have you tried an anti-squirrel feeder? We've got one that hangs off a branch so squirrel can only attempt it downwards. As soon as his weight is on it, a chute slides down to cover the feeder. It does actually work. They tend to just pick up what's on the floor now tho.

antooony

I feed the birds, get a lot of pleasure from watching all sorts of feathered friends peck away at my nuts and fat balls My other half thought I was a bit sad when I dragged her off to our local garden centre and spent £60 on various feeders and food but she watches them more than I do now.

We get great tits, blue tits, long tail tits, chaffinches, green finches, gold finches, robins, wrens, a spotted woodpecker, collard doves, starlongs and sparrows.

My dad trained a robin to take meal worms from his hand when out in his garden. It became that tame it would fly through the patio window into the house and feed.

He had a shock one day when opening his garden shed. He got attacked by a sparrow hawk that had got in through a broken window, gave my dad the fright of his life.

I took this snap of a mandarin duck when I went to see my folks at xmas. It feeds right by their boat on the canal.

deptfordmarmoset

I wouldn't have thought a mandarin duck would have needed such effective camouflage on its back

Anonymous

MrsNapD has taken to feeding a man while I'm out at work. I've only come home once while he was still there, he was very nervous and MrsNapD was rather embarrased.

I think they had jacket potatoes but he didn't eat the skins, well I think he said he had emptied his taters anyway.

cathald

Started feeding this little guy who has been around my house since the weather got bad

just got a picture of him/her today

pneumatic

antooony wrote:

He had a shock one day when opening his garden shed. He got attacked by a sparrow hawk that had got in through a broken window, gave my dad the fright of his life.

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm on about - opening your shed door and being savaged by some crazed raptor! :shock: :evil: That kind of image goes directly to my amygdala and floods my nervous system with adrenalyn. I'll never sleep tonight, just for thinking about it.

snakehips

OK if we're posting birdy pics .................

Birdy Pics

Le Commentateur

Ands wrote:

Le Commentateur wrote:

Less welcome are a couple of hefty squirrels that raid the feeders, though the neighbours cats do a good job of keeping them at a distance.

Have you tried an anti-squirrel feeder? We've got one that hangs off a branch so squirrel can only attempt it downwards. As soon as his weight is on it, a chute slides down to cover the feeder. It does actually work. They tend to just pick up what's on the floor now tho.

I got a couple of feeders that have a globe cage round them that are better than the original cylindrical tubes by themselves that I had first, but the squirrels have worked out that swinging them will tip some loose seeds on to the ground, so they aren't 100% perfect but at least the birds get most of the seed now.