A nice thread about garden birds. What comes to your garden? Do you feed them? What food you put out? 🐦

[Corvid19]

Hello armchair twitchers and window watchers!

I got two bird feeding stations for Christmas and am so enjoying watching from my window now I have them set up.

I have various tits and finches (mostly blue tits and chaffinches), robins, wagtails, collared doves, a wood pigeon or two, and many corvids (rooks and jackdaws mostly, but the odd crow too), blackbirds and sparrows. I think anyway... I'm still not quite expert at identifying them!

I put out fat balls (the corvids demolish them!) mixed seed, sunflower seed hearts, peanuts, dried wormy things, and fat pellets.
The peanuts are not so popular, but perhaps they will be with summer birds? I blooming hope so, I have a big bloody sack of them!

Tell about your birds 🐦

The usual motley crew of blackbirds, blue tits, a robin and pigeons with the occasional goldfinch. A flock of starlings visit sometimes.

Last year I had a little flock of redwings demolishing every single berry in the garden. It was in February, and I hope they will visit again this year.

Great tits, blue tits, green finches, wrens, sparrows, goldfinches, green woodpecker, lesser spotted woodpecker, blackbird, long tailed tit, jackdaws, magpies, Jay.

I feed suet filled coconut shells and a mix of seeds from love garden birds.

I don't feed the birds anymore but a neighbour does and they shit everywhere.
I like watching them but dislike the constant, frantic comings and goings to and from the feeder.

We get blue tits, great tits, robins, sparrows, chaffinches, bull finch, lots of jackdaws, lots of crows, pheasants who have learned to peck on patio doors for food, sparrow hawks, buzzards and once saw an osprey. We live on the edge of farmland.

Oh and blackbirds and wood pigeons

Live fairly rural , about 30 miles from the border of Scotland.
We get lots of various tits , robins , blackbirds , thrushes , dunnocks which hide in the shrubs and run out and pinch what falls from the feeders. We had a kestral in the garden yesterday . We have GreatSpotted Woodpeckers on our peanut butter feeders every day , and out of the two there - fruit or bugs , they nearly always to the buggy one . We get the occasional pheasant , both male and female.
Not birds but we also put up squirrel feeders as we get reds and I love seeing them scamper up the tree to get into the feeder.

We have blackbirds, blue tits, coal tits, a dunnock, starlings, a magpie and, in the summer, goldfinches. We have had a wren before, but I haven't seen it this year.

I put out coconut shells with fat stuff in for the tits, also hang fat balls up, mixed seeds and nuts for the others. I soak currants in hot water to soften them and then put those out mixed with digestive biscuit, cheese and suet. We also put water out.

I love feeding the birds since we moved. To start with I only got jackdaws, magpies, collared doves and a fat pigeon. Now I also get robins, sparrows, blackbirds. I've even had a pair of jays and a squirrel which was rather exciting

The bird table is DH's great delight in life. We feed niger seeds for the goldfinches, and a mixture of other stuff for the rest which includes, blue/great/long-tailed and coal tits, robins, blackbirds, thrushes and mistle thrushes, nuthatches, yellow and pied wagtails, dunnocks, chaffinches and hawfinches, plus the occasional bullfinch (when it's not stripping blossom buds). We also get collared doves, pigeons, jackdaws, magpies and jays but we don't encourage them actively. Plus green and pied woodpeckers, a sparrow hawk, pheasants and on one red-letter day we had a visit from a firecrest.

We get loads of wood pigeons, but also a fair few magpies and starlings. Sparrows too.

I do love it when we get a robin, but there don't seem to be so many of them round here this winter.

I bought a bird table during the first lockdown. I hadn't had one for many years because I had had a cat, so it didn't seem fair to tempt the birds into the garden while he was still alive.

Even DH has taken an interest in it. He had never shown much before, but I now find him buying big bags of bird seed, and also ripping up stale food to put out for them.

We put out peanuts, homemade fat/seed balls, berry and insect suet sticks, apples. Our feeders are on an upstairs window and high up on a rose arch out of the cat's reach but near trees for cover.

We get - roughly in order of numbers
Coal tits
Blue tits (use our nest boxes)
Blackbirds
Robins
Wood Pigeons
Chaffinches
Long tailed tits (an flock that seem to tour the neighbourhood and come round every few weeks)
Crows
Lesser spotted woodpeckers (a pair)
Jays (a pair)
Tree creepers (that don't use the special nest box I bought after their nest site in our garage cladding was destroyed by snow damage - I don't know where they go now)
Goldcrest
Dunnock
Bullfinches (when the pine cones open)
The peanuts are regularly raided by several red squirrels.
There are siskins and sparrows in the village, but not in my garden. There are also sand and house martins, swallows, Goldeneye ducks, oystercatchers, various dippers and wagtails, and buzzards.
We are in NE Scotland.

We used to get lots of birds, but had to swap all the feeders for squirrel proof ones as a squirrel decided to chew through our other ones and made off with 4 fat balls! Would have loved to have seen how he carried those off! Hopefully in the spring the little birds will return. Meal worms were the biggest hit, followed by normal bird seed. We only have a small, walled, court yard garden, so have been making a real effort to make it more wildlife friendly.

Love this thread 🙂

We get a couple of friendly robins, lots of house sparrows, blackbirds, blue tits, and starlings. A bold sparrowhawk popped by a earlier this year. And of course the usual pigeons.

I swear by Grumpy Gardener fat balls; the birds can’t get enough of them. You can get them from QVC or Amazon.

The bloody neighbours leave out whole slices of bread, which the larger birds then drop in my pond.

Soooo jealous of the goldcrests and firecrests!

We also have a couple of red kites fly over sometimes, nesting kestrels over the field, and in the field I am reliably informed there are hundreds of skylark, yellowhammers, redpoll and linnet. Of the ones in the field I've only seen the skylark.

On hot summer days I can hear the kestrels calling across the field - it's fantastic.

Sadly we don't have many birds as have dcats and ddogs. We do however out a bird feeder full of our Husky hair!! Would like to think some baby birds appreciate it!

I had a beautiful blue tit family this year which was lovely.
I also get coal tits and long tailed tits.

We used to put food out but then we had rats in the garden so we stopped.

We get robins, blackbirds, collared doves, wood pigeons, sparrows, starlings, blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, wrens, dunnocks, crows and magpies. We saw a sparrowhawk land on two separate occasions and eat a starling. My dc were mesmerized!

I really love my wee birds.

South coast here, surrounded by woods. We have blue tits, coal tits, great tits, long-tailed tits, house sparrows, nuthatches, starlings, goldfinches, greenfinches, robins, greater spotted woodpeckers.

I have a feeding station in the back garden with six feeders and I feed sunflower hearts, mixed seed, fat balls and fat blocks and sometimes mealworms if I'm feeling flush. The DGCs love to watch the birds toing and froing when they come to lunch.

I've not had my bird table for long. At the moment I've only seen a robin, magpies, a pair of doves, a fat wood pigeon. But I can't see it easily, so I'm probably missing some. I've got mixed seed, peanuts, meal worm and half coconut filled with fat. The mealworms go very quickly, the robin loves them!

Robins
Dunnocks
Great Tits
Blue Tits
Goldfinches
A very occasional Wren
Blackbirds
Magpies
A Jay
Tree Sparrows
House Sparrows
Wood Pigeons
Collared Dove
And bastard, greedy rampaging grey Squirrels .

@Tal45

You can't put out a trap to catch a rat that's outside! Anything could get caught in it. If you're concerned about rats then the best thing to do is to stop putting out food for a while.

We get long tailed tits which are my favourite. They never come alone always in groups of 6 or more. Woodpeckers are another favourite of mine.

Of course you can, you just put them along its run and cover it with an old tile or plank. Or put them in / under the shed / logstore / decking they're using to live in. Never had anything other than a rat (or mouse) and never had any traps go missing

Meant to add, I keep a book on birds by the window and write down the names of any I see in the back. No new ones for a while but hopefully come the busy Spring!

Other people mentioning woodpeckers have prompted me to check, and ours are Great Spotted ones. They are the size of a blackbird and have red underneath.
I also forgot our Great tits, two pairs I think.

We're in a woody area and have robins, blue tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, occasional tree creeper, wrens, pigeons, pheasants, black birds, a jay, dunnocks, wood peckers and hear an owl or two. Lots of pigeons and rooks too. Over the garden we see buzzards and a red kite or two.

DH is the bird man in our house, I've not usually got my glasses on, but the binos are always out.
We feed them fat balls, old apples for the blackbirds and mixed seeds.