Home & Round and About

After the weekends heavy metal fest. Back to birding.............
We have for many years being trying to attract birds to the garden other than Woodpigeons and Magpies and suddenly we seem to be on the radar.

The last year or so has seen an increase in House Sparrows, Blue Tits, Great Tits and the occasional Goldfinches. But the last few weeks has gone bananas!
The Goldfinches are now hear all the time and occasionally turn up mob handed, going for both the niger seed and sunflower hearts, then at last Bullfinches. The last time we saw a Bullfinch was in 2008! But now they are a daily visitor, we are made up!

To add to the Bullfinches we are now seeing regular Greenfinches, again they just use to be a very occasional visitor but now are also seen daily (that's the advantage of working from home!)

Now another big surprise in the last fortnight has been Starlings. Until last week we don't think that we had ever had Starlings in our garden, but now they come in a few times a day and in numbers. The other birds don't seem to mind and neither do we!

We have had another first for the garden this month as well, a Collared Dove, chuffed with that too!

Also this week a Blackbird family has been about, its been a delight to watch the parents feeding the 3 fledglings. So all is looking good in the back garden.

Yesterday I manged a very quick walk down to the canal, there wasn't a great deal about except a Coot family that allowed me to get quite close:

Bald as a Coot, perhaps

This youngster seemed to be with the above little uns!

And a couple of other snaps:

Speckled Wood Butterfly (I had to look this up, as I don't do Butterflies!)

I have no idea! Some kind of Hoverfly?