Hobbies and Crafts

Kandj.....Have you sent any Starlings to me??? After years of not having any,I just spotted 2 on the lawn.I'm hoping they are just passing through.I nipped out and flapped my arms and sent them over the hedge :-D

Ann twice today I have seen a Kite being chased off by a crow.It gets so close it's almost nipping its tail :-S
The Squirrel seems to have abandoned the window feeder now in favour of the peanut ball.Which is fine but then there are lots of bits of nuts and skins that fall to the ground and the big Wood Pidgeons come to pick up the bits.The trouble is it is right outside my back door and we are having to watch where we step because of all the poop :-S
I think the ball will have to be moved further down the garden.Also my Patio Chairs are getting decorated :-S :-S
I think finally the air is clearing from all this mucky pollution.It is not looking so hazy now.The car wash people at the Supermarket were picking up a lot of trade earlier :-D
But I am going to wait another day or two before I get mine done.I don't want to be too hasty and then find it covered again in the horrible brown dust.

The spotted Woodpecker with the bright Red Bonnet was back again today :-DThey are so noisy at the moment .The Owls too,and a Pheasant .That one starts just after 4am at the moment :-S
OH and I are having words about keeping the bedroom window/s open or shut at night.I have to have at least one open but OH is fed up being woken up by the Dawn Chorus.He shuts them and I open them again in the middle of the night :-D :-D

Saw a Red Kite today in the Cotswolds between Andoverford and Stow on the Wold, not seen them there before.

Hope your witch hazel cutting survives Vera. Plenty more TLC should do the trick.
I am trying the same with a Diadora plant I ordered last year from Amaz*n, it looks a very sorry specimen but I am hopeful it will perk up and survive.

Only starlings using the window feeder and pigeons and collard doves flying around today..... very boring really compared with the very interesting sighting from you all.

Haven't seen much in the way of birds today but they are probably keeping away as OH has been working outside on some paving. The pigeons have been around pecking at the ground and ignoring OH and the collared dove is still sitting on her scruffy and precarious nest, though I haven't seen her partner for a day or two.

However, some animal or bird has been digging in my pots and my gut instinct is blackbirds. With most of the pots it doesn't matter; it's just annoying having to sweep up after them. However, when we were in our old house I accidentally broke off a very short length of twig from a witch hazel. Normally I would have just got rid of it but in a mad moment I decided to pot it up and see if I could get it to root. I kept it in a greenhouse, nursed it, talked tenderly to it and eventually it made a couple of tiny roots. I then potted it on and put it outside but continued to give it lots of TLC. It is now about 8" tall with little green leaves just starting to open and I am very proud of it.

Today I was in the garden and thought it was leaning at a strange angle. It is only in a little pot and something had thrown out at least half the compost. It did not look happy. I've potted it up again and hope I've managed to rescue it in time but if it doesn't survive those blackbirds had better watch out. I'll be on the warpath!!

Hello Everyone :-)
Well the birds are very busy flirting about and building there nests.
I have noticed that a Nuthatch , Thrush and Woodpecker are taking beak-fulls of my bird feed away, so that means they are either feeding young or there partner sitting on the nest. I have made up 5 large water containers of my mix to day, 1 feeder will last 8 to 10 days.

Kandi~~you can buy quite strong firm red plastic empty nets which are not like the nets you buy with nuts in. You can also wrap a piece of chicken wire round a apple to stop the squirrel's nicking it. Or stick a cane in the garden and push the apple onto it.
I will see if I can send you a photo through GR, have you got access to Jude's photo blog? I have loads of photos on there.

Shaun

Ours isn't completely paved Kandj, we have a fairly wide border across the front behind the wall, we have left the drive normal width at the entrance not open right across the front, then we have a bed at the back under the kitchen window which is in the front, and a wide gravelled strip between our garden and our neighbours. So plenty of places where the rain can soak away. :-) :-) :-)

Lesley, hope you enjoyed your lazy day.
Our front garden is lawn with mainly low shrubs in border which is easy to maintain. I have toyed with the idea of having a feeding station but I'm not sure that it would look right being so tall, bit like a clothes prop but necessary to deter neighbourhood cats from reaching feeding birds...... still not entirely sure yet about that idea as yet. (Great minds think alike ha ha).

Glamping sounds very posh Jane, but obviously not so. Hannah and friends are sure to have had a lot of laughs and no aching bones with such young blood.

Several of our younger neighbours have done as you have Ann and had paved their front gardens for extra car parking space and to get their cars off the road.

We did away with our front lawn two years ago when we block paved to get my car off the road, we also wanted to cut down on garden jobs like lawn mowing. We also reduced the rear lawn by making a gravel bed in the centre. Still plenty to do out there OH will be 76 this year, We hope he continues to have good health.

Kandj ,you asked me other day what Glamping was.it is supposed to be posh camping,but the place where my daughter went was not that glam lol.Far from it by all accounts.I thought they were going to be in Yurts(?sp).But the photo she showed me it looked like just a big Stype of Scout tent !!.They did have very comfortable mattresses.I think that was the most positive thing :-S.

Talking of lawns.My OH is having nightmare with ours at the moment as there has been so much moss.He has just bought a scaryfier as raking by hand was just too much hard work .It is a big lawn.One neighbour doesn't give two hoots about his back lawn and it is such pity.The other side the lady keeps her front one looking lovely.Just thinking about it there are not that many houses with front lawns down our road.It is probably because the back gardens are so long and need so much attention there isn't enough time or energy lol to mow fronts too.
We have had a lot of this air pollution today and I think it making us all feel a bit wishy washy :-S

After having the builders here for 4 days we are lucky to have a lawn at all Lol :-D

kandj I have a niece with a lawn like your neighbours, she doesn't even like people walking on the grass :-S
Have you got anything at the front were you can hang feeders that are filled with Shaun's fat seedcakes, that might do the trick.

Lesley having a very lazy day :-D

Please send some warmth and sunshine to me in Yorkshire because it's overcast and cold chilly breeze and I've switched the heating back on again this morning.

I have made Shaun's fat seedcake and it is chilling in the fridge right now. I chopped some fruit and added this to bread to fill the window feeder and only the starlings have come to empty the lot in double quick time!

No Lesley, I haven't taken your advice to throw bread in my neighbours garden as the lawns either side of us are like bowling greens. The men are out with their lawn mowers more often than I vacuum our carpets and wouldn't take kindly to this at all.

What I need to do is attract the tiny tits and finches that dart about on the feeders on the lop-sided tree at the bottom of our garden, but they are all obviously happily fed and watered down there and unlikely to come seeking food around the front.
They love Shauns fat seedcake, but I need binoculars to fully watch their antics from out of the back window though and might be seen as a "peeping tom" ha ha.

What glorious weather we have had today 21c and clear blue skies :-D not many birds about but plenty of butterflies, BIG black bumblebees and queen wasps or hornets looking for somewhere to nest :-|

kandj I hope you took my advice and through some bread in your neighbours garden ;-) ;-)

Jane M is only 14 weeks :-)

Lesley x

It's such a pity that window feeder hasn't been a hit with the birds you hoped for Kandj.
I still can't understand why.You certainly can't say you haven't tried lol
As I was sitting in bed this morning with my cuppa and Kindle I kept hearing Geese flying over.I was leaping in and out of bed like a yoyo lol trying to get a sighting.In the end I did see 2.Whether it was the same 2 flying around in circles I don't know.

Good morning everyone.

Rainy and overcast this morning and cold as well. Starlings not fussed with the bread in the window feeder and so almost no takers or any birds interested, boo hoo.

Not sure if this is working for us. The window feeder has been in place since 19 December and it seemed to take forever before the solitary young blackbird appeared regularly. We were delighted and then the Starlings took over both the window feeder and the ground feeder.
On Lesley's advice I stopped using the ground feeder and then Idecided to put only bread in the window feeder to discourage the very greedy starlings who were emptying the suet pellets and then the fat birdseed cake (Shaun's recipe) at an alarming rate. They are noisy, aggressive, greedy birds and not my favourites at all.

It still seems very quiet bird wise again today.Still plenty on the feeder but they don't appear to be queuing up to take turns like usual lol
The Blackbirds have been busy on the lawn though.OH raked a load of moss out of it yesterday so I'm guessing there must be some goodies there :-D

Well little Baby M is a clever girl Leslie .Very advanced for her age :-D :-D.How old is she now? 4/5 months?.Maybe not even that .I can't remember when she surprised everyone.

Fairly mild today but very overcast and there have been one or two short showers. Apart from the pigeons and the collared doves who seem to have moved in with us, I have hardly seen any birds today. There has been a bluetit on the suet cake and the male sparrow on the seeds. At least he seems happy with the cheaper ones I bought in the market; he was backwards and forwards to the feeder for quite a while.

I also wondered about putting an apple into a net as Shaun suggested. The feeder we bought had hooks for fat balls in nets but, as the RSPB seemed to be against that, we took them down and bought a different kind of container for the fat balls.

In our last house we had a large and very old apple tree. I used to leave a lot of windfalls down on the ground and the birds loved them, particularly the blackbirds, and occasionally field fares.

Aww, bless baby M...... a very special gift indeed.

It looks Spring like but I have felt really chilled just pegging the washing out on the clothes line earlier on. Not very many birds around here at all today.

Sorry, all I meant about seeing the jays was that they were probably there eating the birds eggs and nestlings :-(

kandj M has very grown writing for someone so young ;-)

Lesley x