Oct 28th, 2013

Author: marionmccune

Feeding the Birds

When we arrived we discovered a load of empty bird feeders. The former occupants had obviously been feeding them – but I was in a bit of a dilemma as whether to continue with this, because we have two Bengal cats, one of which is a monster hunter. In the end I came to the conclusion that the benefit to the wildlife in getting the extra food was going to be more that the cats could remove by catching them. I also put bells on their collars (which strangely they don’t seem to mind), and bought two ‘cages’ from the RSPB website. The idea of these is that small birds can go in and out and squirrels, large birds and cats can’t. I was a bit bothered by the squirrel piece because I want to encourage our native red squirrel, but as it turns out, they must have been referring to greys – as the reds are small enough to come and go.

I would never have believe how many birds we could attract. We have tits of all descriptions, robins, blackbirds, sparrows, and more chaffinches than we can count. We also have four jays, (see picture in wildlife section), a woodpecker, a heron, and a buzzard (the latter two don’t come to the feeder!). Best of all we have at least four (four is the most we have seen at one time) red squirrels which are incredibly entertaining to watch.