BGB

The rain continues to fall, with a few dry and bright spells this weekend; this is useful, as it’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend and the birds are less active in wet weather, at least in the open where I can see them.

We’ve only had a couple of periods of hard weather so far this winter, and food will be plentiful for the birds.  A woodpigeon was feeding precariously on some ivy berries the other day, and the early shoots and buds in the fields and hedges will be providing sustenance for the smaller birds.  A lot of them hang out on the shrubs, looking for insects in the bark, eating berries or buds or just preening or sheltering.  However our fatball container continues to attract interest from tits, sparrows and the occasional robin or blackbird that can master the technique, and other birds gather underneath to eat the dropped food; today a pheasant with a claw foot (he manages to stump around quite successfully) was enjoying a feast after a small chunk of fatball had fallen out into the grass.  Another attraction is the old table outside the dining room window with its array of windfall apples, providing us with a close-up view of blackbirds and robins coming for a meal; the beak-marks in the fruit show which apples are the current favourites!  A male blackcap has found them and has been visiting regularly for the past few days to have a hearty eat. 

Beak-marks in the apple!

The Garden Birdwatch started slowly; my first brief attempt was during the late morning, by which time the birds had had their fill of breakfast and had retreated to cover to digest it, and I gave up as the results weren’t looking like a true reflection of the birdlife of this garden.  But another attempt in late afternoon was much better, with a really good list of birds.  True, there weren’t many sparrows – we can have a dozen or more at a time – and no great tits or starlings, but our two robins came, two pheasants and a partridge visited, a small flock of goldfinches gathered in the hazels with a couple of chaffinches among them, both the blackcap and the marsh tit dropped by (have to look carefully to tell them apart!) and – a real treat – a treecreeper spent some time checking out the apple tree.  An appearance by the song thrush would have been nice, and the fieldfares haven’t been much in evidence this year, but you can't have everything; blackbirds, blue tits and a dunnock made up the rest of the list.

Snowdrops ready for the Burns Supper (hellebores and viburnum behind)

The days are starting to lengthen slowly, the snowdrops are opening (a few cut to provide table decorations for the village Burns Supper) and the birds are showing the first signs of having mating on their minds.  A woodpecker has been drumming in the trees opposite, the robins are tentatively feeding together again as a prelude to pairing up and a small bird, probably a tit, has taken a look at the nestbox. 

The value of nets

One of the lessons I’ve learnt over the past year has been the value of covering veg crops with fleece or netting.  In recent years I’ve tried to cover brassica crops such as cabbages with nets – not always very successfully! – against cabbage white butterflies, which lay their eggs on them (producing caterpillars that eat their way through the plant), and to lay fleece on newly-planted garlic cloves to stop birds from pulling them up.  But more is needed, particularly against the pigeons and partridges.

I removed the fleece from the garlic bed in early winter, so that the garlic leaves could grow up straight.  It didn’t stop the birds; while the bulbs have remained in situ, the leaf tips have been eaten off.  I think the plants will survive, but it’s annoying.  Equally annoying is the adjacent bed of radicchio, which I didn’t cover (thinking, naively, that it would be too bitter for the wildlife to attack), but which has been nibbled down and in some cases scratched up.  Too late now to do anything about it; although the plants might recover and grow new leaves in the spring/summer, as one rogue plant left from autumn 2024 has done, I will want that part of the bed for other plants.  Then there’s the sad demise of last year's leeks, attacked by allium leaf miner; I shall have to net my leeks this year to prevent another attack. 

On a more positive note, this winter’s brassicas have been netted and are doing well (so far); no pigeons eating the broccoli tops, no butterfly damage on the spring cabbages.  Lesson learnt.

Broad bean seedlings, still in the cold frame

The first sowing of broad beans, sown in late autumn and kept in the cold frame until yesterday, has gone into the ground (the bed vacated by the leeks - any leaf miners remaining in the soil shouldn’t attack the beans), and a tent of fleece placed over the top.  In the cold weather, hungry pigeons and partridges, and maybe pheasants, will peck at anything green, and being large birds they can pull plants out of the ground quite easily (like the radicchio!); in winter other birds can scratch through freshly laid mulch in search of grubs, regardless of any small plants in the way.  Once the weather warms up, they might not be so destructive, and once the shooting season stops in a few weeks’ time the game birds won’t necessarily be hanging around the garden so much.  There were 20 partridges gathering on the lawn a few days ago, and a dozen or so hiding in the shrubs today.  In a few weeks' time I might be able to protect plants with a nest of pointy sticks instead of nets or fleece!

Icy nights

 

Hellebores - already in flower

After a mostly mild autumn and early winter, the post-Christmas weather has been fairly chilly, especially overnight, and sometimes icy.  There has been little snow yet, though some is forecast for the next couple of days.  Nevertheless, at least some plants are ahead of themselves, with a few snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii) and hellebores already in flower.

The New Year’s Day flower count wasn’t much up on previous years, however: twelve in all, including the winter shrub stalwarts (rosemary, winter jasmine, winter honeysuckle, and Viburnum tinus – but not the Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’, which has been and gone some time ago); the aforementioned snowdrops and hellebores; the Vinca major which is still resisting my attempts to pull it out of the front wall; and isolated flowers on the variegated lamium (dead-nettle), Geum ‘Mrs Bradshaw’ (one bloom, frankly rather past its best), the miniature strawberries and various patches of meadow grass; as well as some unidentified salad leaf seedlings (mustards?) in the cold frame that I haven’t got round to eating yet.

The dahlias were dusted down, dried off and wrapped up, and put in the garage for protection from the frost, before the temperatures dropped.  Those other plants of questionable hardiness are tucked up in the greenhouse, and the rest left to take their chances outdoors.

The colder weather has brought back a few of the Scandi-avians, who haven’t been much in evidence through recent weeks; a fieldfare has been enjoying the fallen apples.  Bullfinches have dropped in to enjoy the flowers on the winter honeysuckle (there are plenty of them this year).  A song thrush has been down a few times, and the marsh tit continues to come to the fatballs along with the more usual tits; I hope both of those stay around for the Big Garden Birdwatch later this month.