Birds you've seen today

A part albino Moorhen gave me a bit of a surprise today.  Picture coming up.

Regards roy J 

Yesterday actually.......a pair of long tail tits, a pair of goldfinches a tree creeper, a wren and the usual assortment of great tits & bluetits....plus about a dozen blackbirds...........oh! and the robin........all on my bird feeders( peanuts & niger seed) and the corsican pine in the back garden.

hi Wolf,

Re the Kookaburra, 

Firiends in Esk have a particulalry tame one  in their garden, it actally comes and sits on the hand to be fed. Chopped liver seems to be the favourite!

Hi Lorraine,

You seem to get a great variety of birds in your garden. All we get here is starlings, hundreds of them, do they drive the other birds away?

I couldn't resist posting Roy's part albino Moorhen.

What a great find.

Picture by Roy Jackson

I get starlings too, Ray, but haven't seen any for a while ....I think the answer is that there are no cats around here.   There is also a good variety of trees....and lots of them.....round about where |I live.

There is a large old house (now used as offices) set in it's own grounds so it's like a mini wildlife haven for owls and foxes and woodpeckers.  In the past I've had  a nuthatch, goldcrest and woodpecker at  the feeder.

The cats probably have a lot to do with it, Lorraine.  I heard a statistic from Audubon once that said that they guesstimate that about 17 million songbirds in the US are killed annually by house cats.

Ray - do your starlings do those fantastic cloud formations?

Yes they do Ruth. The sky is quite black with them sometimes. They even pick a the dog's bone in the garden. So much for bird seed. lol

Hi Lorraine,

What a lovely location for bird watching. there are several nature reserves and lakes around here where I have to go to see such birds, although I am no bird spotter and really could not tell a flamingo from a condor.They all look great to me!

Lorraine, you seem to get the same sort of species as I do here. This is a great time of the year for bird watching, there will be flocks of mixed finches from now right through winter, such as yellowhammers with reed buntings, goldfinches with greenfinches and sometimes bramblings, siskins in their hundreds with redpolls and chaffinches with bramblings too.

Also, the fieldfares and redwings are starting to form flocks together, this is always a lovely sight.

There is an abundance of berries this year too, so keep an eye out for waxwings, they migrate if the berry crop isn't too good in NE Europe. You're more likely to see these in the South East and East of England.