Visitors to our garden

It always surprises me how some birds in the garden become quite tame, flying down for food as soon as we appear outside, or even peering hopefully through the window, while others, such as the greenfinches, chaffinches and bramblings, never seem to become tame.

Recently a robin has joined the company of the friendly birds. This one isn't as tame as the robin we had a few years ago, but it has fed from my hand and even perched on Fred's shoes.

The footprints in a fresh fall of snow this morning gave us some idea of the visitors we didn't see, so we could be fairly sure that these three were the only ducks to come for their breakfast this morning.

The ducks used to return at the very end of March, but since the two very cold winters they have been arriving much earlier. We suspect that they were spending the winter where they had access to open water and, when that froze over, they returned to us, and have kept up the habit of returning early since then. As they tend to visit at dawn and dusk, I have to get up very early to break the ice for them, especially until the clocks change to summertime.

This squirrel's fur coat was doing a good job of keeping the snow out.

Our blackbird is still calling several times a day, demanding currants. He is now less aggressive towards the female blackbird so perhaps they will soon be nesting.

Today he was joined by a very determined starling.

Waxwings again?

This morning I had to go to the west end of Glasgow, which is quite close to the Clyde. Waxwings tend to follow the Clyde, so on my way back I thought I would choose a route that would take me past some possible waxwing sites. Last week they were reported from a street that we passed just half an hour later, so I was optimistic when I saw a flock of birds flying backwards and forwards between the trees ahead of me. Just before I got close enough, they all flew away behind some houses. I managed to find a way through between the houses and found that every tree was crowded with... fieldfares.

I should have been satisfied with that, but of course that wasn't what I had hoped to see. Continuing on my way, about a mile further on, I could see ahead of me some trees where I had seen waxwings about 4 years ago. They were covered in brown leaves...

...but as I drew closer I realised that the waxwings were just sitting very still.

I counted a total of 184 birds. A very satisfactory conclusion to the morning.

Unfortunately the weather was dull and I didn't have my best camera with me, but for pictures of waxwings in our garden in 2001, see our waxwing pages.

For some excellent pictures of waxwings on Fair Isle, see

October 25th 2010. A day we'll always remember

Hey Dad... this is like fishing for birds

Henry and the waxwings - hand-feeding again

Waxwings in my hand - video

Bohemian waxwing feathers

Hungry birds

Our garden seems full of hungry birds just now, and some have become very tame. The most demanding for food are the starlings, jackdaws and blackbirds. One of the jackdaws appears almost as soon as I open the door, and the male blackbird has been hopping right up the steps to try and beat the other birds, occasionally even feeding from my hand. At first he was scared of the starlings, but then he discovered that he was able to scare them by being extremely aggressive. One of the starlings stood up to him, and there were some fights, both on the ground and in mid-air, that were so fierce that neither got any food.

Yesterday I decided to mow the front lawn, so I wasn't as attentive to their needs as usual. I was very surprised to turn around and find a female duck approaching the duck food trays, as most of the mallard ducks that now visit us are quite nervous and fly off if we open the front door, yet this one didn't seem much bothered about the mower. Just then, Fred shut the garage door, and that was too much for her. She flew off, and I went to find Fred. I was rather puzzled to hear noises coming from the house as I was sure he must be at the garage. Then I realised what had happened. I had left the front door open a few inches for the cable to the mower, and the male blackbird had taken advantage of my absence to find out where the food supply was. Unfortunately he went too far and ended up in our sitting room where he panicked. He must have been there for some time before I found him, because that end of the room was covered in black feathers as he continued to flutter against the window. I opened the window and out he went.

I didn't see much of him for the rest of the day. Today he is back and as demanding as ever, but his manners towards the starlings seem to have improved. I think he has lost just a bit of his confidence as a result of his adventure.

Eigg birds

While we were on Eigg, we had several close encounters with birds.

On a walk through the moorland in the centre of the island, several red grouse leaped out from almost under my feet. Unusually, they didn't fly off making their "go-back, go-back" alarm call, but just walked out of my way. That gave me the opportunity to take a couple of photos before they flew off.

A few days later, we visited a friend who lives in the north of the island. She put out some corn for the birds, and a group of rock doves flew down to feed.

These are the wild birds from which domesticated pigeons were bred. The two have interbred, and pure wild birds are now only found on the west and north coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

The wild version has two black wingbars and a white rump which mostly only shows when the bird is in flight.

Hooded crows frequently visited the garden of the house where we were staying. These are a subspecies of the carrion crow, and they replace the carrion crow in the north and west of Scotland.

Winter birds, and other things

Winter is always a good time to see unusual birds in the garden. This winter has been no exception as we have seen large numbers of redpolls and siskins, a fieldfare, 2 reed buntings and 3 waxwings. Apart from the waxwings (who were away before I had time for a decent photo) our most welcome visitors have been bramblings. We only saw these birds in our garden for the first time last winter, and then it was only the odd one or two birds. This year we have seen them every day, with a maximum of 10 birds present. There are 6 in the picture below, with 3 greenfinches at the top of the picture.

Bramblings are very similar to chaffinches in appearance, but with pink rather than white in the wings, a scaled pattern on the back, and a white rump.

Another unusual encounter on 22nd December was when this tiny goldcrest flew down beside me when I visited our local shopping centre.

On the same day I visited Victoria Park in Glasgow, where the swans and a number of tufted ducks were restricted to a small patch of open water, as the rest of the pond was frozen over.

For a couple of days at the end of December we had a freezing fog which covered everything in rime. Every plant seemed to have acquired thorns.

For more pictures, see the ice section of our website. This has just been given some extra publicity as the BBC mentioned it in their "Home Planet" programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 11th January. Their reason was that they discussed ice spikes in the previous programme on 4th January. You can listen to both programmes by visiting the BBC Home Planet web pages.

Quite by chance this week I had the largest ice spike I had ever seen - 143mm or nearly 6 inches in height. The tray was 190mm in diameter.

Flight, but this time not birds. I caught this shot of a plane passing the moon.

A week in the garden

Firstly I have to admit that I haven't exactly spent all week gardening, or even in the garden. I've tried to do a bit of clearing up, and this morning we cut the tops off some willow trees which were getting too tall to prune easily. Weeding is just about impossible, as everything grows faster than I can weed, and with orchids coming up everywhere including the garden beds and tubs, it's hard to weed without pulling some out accidentally.

Our drive is now a mass of Fairy Foxglove (Erinus alpinus). I bought one small pot of this some years ago and it has seeded itself everywhere where it can find suitable habitat - in gravel and cracks in concrete.

This flower originates from southern Europe, but has been known in the wild since 1867 and has spread rapidly recently, particularly on the walls of ruins.

A couple of years ago, Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium montanum) appeared in our drive among the Fairy Foxglove. Its appearance is a total mystery as I haven't seen it in any other local gardens. Its blue flowers open only in sunshine.

Another small plant which has seeded itself prolifically in our drive is the New Zealand Willowherb (Epilobium brunnescens).

This tiny plant, related to the very much larger willowherbs including Rosebay, was first seen in the wild in Edinburgh in 1904 and has spread widely since then, particularly in the north and west of the UK. We often find it on forestry paths when we are out walking.

I'm seldom in the garden for long before some of the birds start arriving, hoping for food. The most regular is this jackdaw, who is nesting in a chimney across the road. If I happen to walk past the chimney on my way home, he often flies down and accompanies me to the door where, of course, he usually gets rewarded with some food.

I suspect he is feeding young, as he collects a considerable amout of food before flying back with it to the chimney, then returning a few minutes later. If I'm in the garden for any length of time, I'm usually soon surrounded by any number of jackdaws and starlings.

Some of the tits are also getting quite bold. This coal tit flew back and forth to the feeder while I was standing only about a meter away.

I was about to refill the peanut feeder when I discovered this Brimstone Moth (Opisthograptis luteolata) inside. I have no idea how it could have got there.

Dandelions are a very common weed in our garden, and it's usually impossible to get the long roots out. I pulled this one out of one of the tubs and about 30cm of root came with it. I was interested to see that, although it was two plants, the two roots had fused to form one single root.

On Wednesday morning I was up early - at about 6 am - to refill the duck food trays. I opened the front door and found myself face to face with a fox. Of course it was away long before I could get my camera on it. One of our neighbours saw a roe deer on our front garden a week or two earlier. These visitors are never around the houses during the daytime, but on Thursday we surprised this one in a nearby field. It cleared the fence with no problem.

In the nearby fields we have noticed that everything seems to be flowering more vigourously than usual. This hawthorn is so covered in flowers that there is almost no room for the leaves.

After the snow 2

Now that we are suddenly having warm, sunny days that seem like summer, it is hard to remember that only 10 days ago I was cross-country skiing on the hills just half an hour's drive from our house.

When I wrote the previous entry entitled "After the snow," I didn't imagine that we would have so much more cold weather with plenty more snow although we mostly had to travel short distances to get to it. I spent so many days cross-country skiing that other things, such as keeping up this blog, got left behind.

Towards the end of February I visited Loch Lomond twice. Large parts of it were frozen, and this picture was taken on 21st February at Balmaha on the east shore.

Two days later, after a day's hill walking, we stopped off at Loch Lomond Shores at the south end of the loch. Here, too, the loch was largely frozen, though there was little snow on Ben Lomond in the background.

The Fintry Loup is a large waterfall in the River Endrick, and I visited it when it was still partly frozen. The amount of water coming down was considerably less than usual, not only because of the ice, but also because we had so little rainfall.

On 24th February more snow fell, and two days later we went skiing at the Queen's View by the road to Drymen. Unfortunately, further up the hill the snow was not only very deep but a hard crust had formed on it which we continually broke through, making skiing very difficult and tiring.

Better conditions followed and we had several magnificent days of skiing in the Carron Valley Forest. The hill in the distance is Meikle Bin.

The Carron Valley Reservoir, like almost every other area of water, was completely frozen.

In some places it was hard to tell where the land ended and the water began.

Although it appears that the ice is melting in the picture below, it was only surface water, and when we visited again a few days later the surface was once again solid ice.

The continuing cold weather produced many more ice spikes in our garden, especially after I discovered that using de-ionised water greatly increased the likelihood of spikes developing. This double spike appeared on 31st January.

Another strange phenomenon, which I began to see with increasing frequency on lochs and reservoirs which had been frozen for some time, was large stars forming in the surface of the ice.

There is an article about this in the Physical Review, published by the American Physical Society.

While the cold weather lasted, we continued to be visited by large flocks of redpolls. The largest count I made was 84 on 5th February. The numbers dropped off as the weather became milder, though a pair of redpolls was still present last week.

Now, by contrast, we have warm, sunny weather. There are new flower species coming out every day, and they are catching up fast.

Bramblings and Redpolls

This week has been notable in our garden, not only for some unusual species, but also for the huge numbers that have been visiting.

The most exciting visitors included 2 Bramblings which visited on 17th January and reappeared today. In the picture below, from left to right, are a female Siskin, a male Siskin, a male Redpoll and a female Brambling.

The picture below of the female Brambling shows the scaling pattern on the back and the strong stripes on the head.

The male Brambling (below) has a much darker head.

The other exciting visitors have been a large flock of Siskins and Redpolls which have been with us since the beginning of this week. Today I counted 46 Redpolls and 25 Siskins, though the actual totals were probably much larger as they retreat to a tree which is out of sight from the house. Below are some Redpolls on one of our nyger feeders.

There are more pictures and some videos on the Siskins and Redpolls page on our website.

These birds are a lot of work, as I need to clean all 4 nyger feeders and all the surfaces below them every day, preferably while it is dark so I don't disturb them, in order to minimise the risk of disease among such large numbers of birds. They have been eating about 1KG of nyger every day. Fortunately one of our local shops has it on special offer just now!

Our ducks, which returned more than 2 months earlier than usual, have also been turning up in large numbers. Two days ago there were 11 ducks outside, though we have had as many as 12.

Due to the water freezing in the cold weather, I have been scattering corn on the grass around the water tray. Yesterday the Wood Pigeons discovered it, and there were 13 Wood Pigeons gobbling it up.

Fortunately there is a simple solution. The ducks mostly come at night when the wood pigeons are asleep. It is also at night that the water is most likely to freeze, so I can leave corn on the grass at night, and put it in the water during the day.

There is more about our ducks on our website

After the snow

Here in the west of Scotland, we didn't get as much snow as in some other parts of the UK, but it was very cold and the snow lay for longer - just one day short of 4 weeks.

I have been trying to think of a few pictures that sum up this winter period for me.

First, it has been a fantastic opportunity to get out on cross-country skis, day after day, in some beautiful sunny weather.

Not everything was so easy. There was a national shortage of salt and you could spot where it should have been in the supermarket by the empty shelf. One local retailer managed to get a supply, and advertised it at this roundabout.

The cold weather was not so good for wildlife, and this tiny wren was a victim.

Other birds managed to survive by moving into gardens. Our ducks, normally only with us between April and July, returned in large numbers, mostly at night. Here there are 12 of them on their way to us.

The Lake of Menteith, like many other areas of water, froze to a considerable depth. It was hoped that a "Grand match" or "Bonspiel" could take place. This is a huge curling contest which has not been held for 30 years due to milder weather. Unfortunately logistic problems and a sudden rise in temperature meant that it was cancelled at the last minute. Here a couple are going for a walk on the lake, now covered in a thin layer of water. In the foreground the ice has been marked out for curling. Some matches on a smaller scale were played during the previous weekend.

At the end of the day, the sun caught the Campsies as it set, and turned them gold and red.