The problem is I never know when to stop feeding.

What does bother me is maybe the bird’s dependence on our handouts and maybe I should be letting nature take its often cruel course. ?

 

 

Blue tit on food. such a delightful bird. How little we know.......

 

Seasonal Theft   or unhappy Christmas for the birds.

I have watched as the  public take away from the reserve natural bird food on a regular basis so it seemed appropriate that I should intervene and replace some with seeds and nuts etc.

 Holly with berries is stripped from the reserve by a public rejoicing in the Christmas spirit on the cheap.

 I have seen people walking to their parked cars on  with armfuls of Holly with many red berries, food that a Mistle Thrush would die defending. It might be Christmas but the public should be buying the stuff from another source.

How do you start to tell the perpetrators  that this is theft and depriving the wildlife of their food. The public also take any fungi that they take a fancy too, again food for the wildlife, blackberries, elderberry, sloes etc.

Since writing this they also took two homemade feeders and peanut feeder pictured above, a pity as I was quite proud of these.

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The Mallards, Coots and Moorhen were not forgotten; the Ranger accompanied me to the local supplier and purchased four sacks of mixed feed for the Waterfowl.  They relish this.

Most of the time they are inundated with white bread, thrown by well meaning visitors.  (when the sun is out.)  who  kindly leave the empty food plastic bags thrown down in the hedgerow or on the shore for others to clear away.

White bread has little goodness in it.  When the cold spell arrived no one appeared with any food, only two that I know of with some corn and grain.

I recall my grandmother in 1948 boiling up all the potato peelings and waste vegetables in the pot adding grains and feed to it for the chickens. So I did the same for the Ducks who relished every bit, as did the black headed gulls. No waste in my house.

Nesting Boxes

With the many boxes I made for the reserve and donated to the South Somerset District Council  ( they never have any money)  providing refuge for the woodland birds I was confident we would not lose any  in the reserve.

Food Trail

My food dropping area spans about a mile on retracing my steps its is two miles overall. I try to emulate what I think is the foraging habits of the birds and kept the feeding five feeding areas well apart as they are all territorial.

 Walking through to each I drop handfuls at many different spots which the birds have become accustomed to. And I am frequently met by Tits in the canopy waiting for the food.  They are making the tsee-tsee-tsee call that the young tits and females make when begging for food when I appear instead of the alarm call cha-cha-cha which would be more appropriate, or am I imagining this?

Robins as always are first on the scene and we have a high population of Robins.

Some of these spots are unusual in that the birds appear to know me. (maybe its my imagination) they appear to wait expectantly on the branches very close by whilst I stuff peanuts into the bark crevices of an old dead tree stump 8 ft high. I leave just enough for them to clear it before the squirrels arrive. They are on the food before I am two paces away. I have lots of photos of them doing just that. But I should not be surprised at that behavior as their intelligence is remarkable.