But then I noticed that the branches somehow looked slightly lighter – as though some of the nicer red fruit was no longer present. Then yesterday I saw the culprit – a large jay was sitting in the branches having a munch. When the ‘shy denizen of the woodlands’ (that is a quote from the RSPB website by the way) saw me, it gave me a searching look and flew off with a cherry in its beak.

So knowing that those Jays can eat peanuts at the rate of about two a second I sadly had to go and pick the still slightly under ripe fruit before they cleared the tree. I think I will make a cherry pie and freeze it for the harvest festival in September.

I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo of the cherry thief red handed, but here he (or another member of the family) is on the nut feeder.

There are a few catkins on the trees, the first spring flowers are out, and today R and I heard the first woodpecker. If last year is anything to go by, within a week or so they will be drumming throughout the woodland here. They’re not often seen (though very occasionally we get one at the bird table), but they are certainly noisy.

On the subject of noisy, our jays are also starting to squawk at each other, trying to get a dominant position to hold on to this territory – which must be a very sought after one considering how many nuts we put out. The first year we were here there was one pair which must have had a lot of surviving offspring, because at the moment there are no less than six. I do like them but I hope we don’t end up with 12 this year because they will eat us out of house and home. We also counted six red squirrels at one time in the feeding area yesterday.

The picture is of a rather nice hellebore which is now out in our garden.

Anyway there is going to be a big territorial battle soon I think because this lot are the second batch this summer and they surely all can’t stay in the one area. I only managed to get three of them in the picture (you have to click on it to see the other two).

Also on the bird front, in one of the strange shifts which seem to occur for no particular reason, the siskins have suddenly vanished but we seem to have a lot more assorted tits than a few weeks ago.

We also saw a buzzard being chased by a crow today, and the heron was back on the pond.

We have about six to eight jays in our garden – originally we had two, they were joined by another breeding pair this spring, and we think both sets have had young. They are really aggressive feeders on the nuts, I’ve seen one gobble down about 30 in quick succession. They are also reputedly very intelligent – they are related to magpies which are notorious collectors of shiny things.

So this morning there were four Jays all sitting in a row underneath the emptied feeder. I tried to get a photo but unfortunately they are quite shy and flew off while I was turning the camera on. When I came into the kitchen this evening to make our supper there were six of them – and I saw two of them fly at the feeder and buffet it about. Either they are just getting over excited, or they are deliberately putting their weight on the disk at the bottom so as to be able to get the nuts out faster.

As no pictures of the jays – here is one of the empty feeder….