This month, I have seen bramblings (or maybe just one coming back repeatedly – you can never tell when you see only one at a time) visiting my garden for the first time in the six years of living in this house. They seem to turn up with chaffinches, and go straight to the ground to pick up the food other birds have dropped from the feeders overhead. They are striking to look at, but I’m afraid I don’t have any photos to attach here; I watch them from a big window through a blind so I don’t disturb them, and my phone can’t get a clear enough images.
I don’t remember seeing so many siskins in my garden before. I’ve always thought of them as visitors in distress, only turning up when their usual feeding grounds, wherever they are, are covered in snow and inaccessible. This winter, they turned up despite a lack of snow and seem to have decided that they like this place after all. It’s nearly April, but I’m seeing more and more of these small yellowy finches, fighting for perches on the feeders.
My husband reported a few weeks ago that he spotted a redpoll (or more likely a lesser redpoll, which is actually more common than the common redpoll around here – work that out) while I was out. I have never seen it myself and I hope it will come back. That adds to our regular roll call of finches: goldfinches, greenfinches, bullfinches and chaffinches.
And then there the ubiquitous blue tits, robins, house sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds and wood pigeons. We welcome blackcaps every winter, and song thrushes occasionally. Great tits and coal tits too. Wrens now and again. And goldcrests, but only a few times, visiting the ponds rather than the feeders. And sometimes a sparrow hawk turns up hoping to pick off one of those birds too busy eating to notice the predator.
Bird watching wasn’t my thing, a former cat owner, until I met my husband, who comes from a family of bird watchers. I have no recollection of what birds came to my old garden when I lived in Stirling, because I never looked for them (I assume my cats did, and that must have put a lot of them off). Once you start looking, you notice more and more. When I get out into the garden, sometimes the air is filled with birds loudly chirping away all around you. It feels good.