We have been getting more and more interested in the various birds that flock to our garden - first of all to the garden in the previous house, but especially now that we live almost in the woods. We have also experimented with our cameras - Ricky got a camera of his own for Christmas - and are getting better at taking pictures of them, though we do still end up with a lot of blurry shots.  Here are a few of our attempts......

December 2004 - this was our first attempt, and we were very pleased with it.  This jay and its family and friends visit us often in the winter months.

A blue tit in the tree just outside our window.

- and another.

We were very surprised to see this bullfinch.....

..........closely followed the same day by a nuthatch.

A robin on the snow, January 2006..............

........and another very fat one in the tree.

Ricky took this picture of a blackbird in next door's tree (notice the icicle hanging from our balcony!).

We think this may be a sparrow, though we don't get many of them.  Alternatively it could be a female chaffinch.

Well, okay, it's not a bird, but it obviously thought it was, since this cheeky squirrel came to steal the birds' food.

Here it is again, perched on the fence just outside our bedroom window.

New addition; at last we've managed to get a decent picture of a crested tit.  We didn't realise until recently that these are pretty rare - in the UK they are only seen in the Cairngorms.  Since we live at about the same height as that it's not so surprising that we see a lot of them here.

In the very long winter that we've had this year (it's the end of March and we still have snow on the ground!) we have seen lots of new birds.  This, we think, is a siskin.....

...and here is another one, accompanied by a goldfinch (front of picture).

This bird we aren't sure about, but Ricky suggested a brambling (based on the pictures he has) and it certainly looks like one, from what we can find on the internet.

June 15th 2006 - we've been delighted to find that the nesting box we put up on the carport is actually being used!  These are probably great tit eggs.  We were a bit concerned that the parents might have abandoned the nest, since the carport was being worked on at this time, but....

...clearly they hadn't abandoned the nest, and these babies had hatched by the time we had a peep on the 25th of June.

Here they are again on July 3rd.  We're about to go off on holiday for 10 days, which means two things: 1) we might not get to see the babies fly the nest, but also 2) neither will our cat, Tiggy, since she'll be at the cattery.  This is probably a good thing, since she's not so old she couldn't catch a struggling fledgling.

Update: the warm winter in early 2007 has had its effect here too - we came home from our Easter holiday to find that there are 6 eggs in the nesting box - a whole 2 months earlier than last year!

And here they are on May 12th.  We think they will be leaving the nest pretty soon - their parents are kept at it the whole day bringing them food, and they are beginning to look pretty crowded in there!  Hopefully we'll see them leave the nest this year.
NOTE - we did: on the 16th May as we ate breakfast we noticed a bird appear at the opening and act differently from the parents, looking around before flying to the nearest tree.  It was shortly followed by four more (we must have missed seeing the first one go).  I wonder whether the nest will be used again this season, as it's still so early?

Page edited 20th May 2007.