Today, as nothing much was happening in the bird boxes, I thought I'd tell you about some of the visitors to the bird feeder hanging at the bottom of our garden.
This feeder, which we use to feed live mealworms to the bluetits during the breeding season, currently holds a suet block that Elizabeth makes each fortnight. To make it, she melts 420g of suet (we use Atora) and adds 630g of a mixture of oats, sunflower hearts, mixed seed and ground peanuts until the mixture absorbs all the melted fat. This is then put into two molds and the remaining mixture put into a flat dish. When it sets, the blocks are removed from the molds and used in the feeder. Each block lasts about a week in the feeder.
The first bird we recorded in the feeder this morning was a long tailed tit. They usually go round in flocks so to find just one is fairly unusual.
On occasions there have been too many to count - we believe there have been 10 to a dozen LTTs at a time on the feeder at its busiest.
The most frequent visitors are the bluetits and great tits. Bluetit groups appear quite at ease together and we often get as many as 4 at a time tucking in. Great tits are more wary of each other, although at the moment these two seem to be getting on with each other.
Perhaps the most surprising visitor so far this year is a female blackcap. At the moment, there are long periods each day when she seems to appear three or four times each hour. She stays about a minute eating the fat block and then flies off.
Last year we had both a male and a female visiting us during the winter but neither of them were as regular as this one is at the moment.
Let's hope it continues and she finds a partner when spring arrives.
Another regular visitor is a coal tit. Although this does not turn up as frequently as the blackcap, at the moment it can be seen several times each day.
As I said earlier, the blackcap is not easily put off from feeding when she visits the fat block. Here she can be seen telling a long tailed tit where to go!
Another infrequent visitor is the robin. Whether he comes infrequently because there is usually other food elsewhere in the garden, or because he finds it difficult to get inside the feeder we do not know. He certainly looks awkward as he squeezes himself inside.