My feed
Premium

Please
or
to access all these features

Find tips and tricks to make your garden or allotment flourish on our Gardening forum.

Gardening

Tree felling, relocating the family of tits that call it home?

5 replies

LordJabuJabu · 22/12/2014 19:35

We've just moved into a new house, our garden is lovely but a few trees need felling ASAP.

One of which is home to a family of blue tits (there's loads, can count 5/6 almost every time I look up at it), its so tall I can't tell if they're nesting wildly or in the bird boxes (which we'll obviously take down and hang as high as possible).
The other trees we're having down are the other bigs ones so there's nowhere obvious for them to relocate to (& we have no idea if there are more birds in the other trees)!

Any tips on what we can do to encourage 'our' tits to stay?

OP posts:
Report
Namechangeyetagaintohide · 22/12/2014 19:40

Well are you in the uk ? They won't be nesting right now but can start as early as feb/march time.

Any felling is best taking place place in the winter months to avoid any disturbance if they are nesting. If in doubt you can get a nesting bird survey done and then if they aren't nesting fell during the breeding season.


You can encourage them to come back by putting up nest boxes at different heights and offering food in feeders. Seed mixes and peanut feeders are good for tits. And fat/suet balls. They love those !

Report
acharmofgoldfinches · 22/12/2014 19:44

The best way to encourage them to stay at this time of year is feeding; although they might be using the boxes to shelter in, they won't actually need them for nesting until the Spring, so now is actually the best time of year to be doing tree work, as there are no nests and no baby chicks or fledglings to have to worry about.

Nesting can start as early as February so get the trees sorted out before then.

Report
acharmofgoldfinches · 22/12/2014 19:45

X post - great minds namechange Grin

Report
Namechangeyetagaintohide · 22/12/2014 19:46
Grin
Report
LordJabuJabu · 22/12/2014 22:21

Ooh thank you both! That's a massive relief, want to keep the garden as wildlife friendly as possible so fingers crossed they stick around.

We've a couple of feeders so hopefully that'll be enough to bribe them into staying

OP posts:
Report
Please create an account

To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.