Cold nights & Full Tummies !

I started the week with a lot of  work and other leisure related commitments and then got felled mid-week by the’ mother of all colds' and so was 'confined to barracks' and left with just the back garden for topical wildlife news. The cold frosty weather (but no more snow), mentioned in Monday's post, continued until Thursday night, indeed on Wednesday my north facing front lawn remained frozen all day. This bought the birds flocking to my feeders in the back garden, for they needed extra food to keep warm, as temperatures dropped below freezing.

It’s quite a challenging time for birds when it’s cold, for they need to balance weight against having enough food reserves to survive the cold nights. Being small, birds have a high surface area / mass ratio, so lose heat rapidly.  The simple solution would be to stuff themselves with food all day and sleep during the night, living off the food they ate in the day. Not so simple. Put on too much weight and you can’t take off so quickly enough when a predator bounces, or swoops, to eat you, so you become one fat, but dead bird !

So what birds tend to do is eat first thing in the morning, to top up the food reserves burnt keeping warm during the cold nighttime temperatures . They then lightly graze during the day, before another feast just before it gets dark. In cold weather heat loss can be so great that feeding has to be an all-day event. At bit like all day breakfast at the café in the town !

Monday – Thursday were all day breakfast days in my back garden  J.

Lots of blackbirds, starlings and wood pigeons, which are the ‘Dyson’ of the local bird world ; scraps of food are hoovered up at an alarming rate !

My favourite of recent years is a relative newcomer to the garden, the Reed Bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus). 

Male Reed Bunting (from the RSPB website).

They look a bit like house sparrows (Passer domesticus)  & I first noticed them coming regularly to the garden feeders during the  winter about 5 years ago. Sometimes there are just one or two and other time five  – six birds. But they are one of the changes to bird species which have taken to visiting our bird tables in the last 10 -12 years. Why this change of behaviour? Because there is less food in the open countryside and like other wildlife species they have discovered that urban areas offer food, warmth & shelter.

The wildlife world is always changing and it is spotting the changes which makes wildlife watching interesting, even when it’s in your own back garden J.

Next week end is the RSPB ‘Big garden bird watch’, a national event where people are asked to spend just one hour recording the birds visiting their gardens and to send the information into the RSPB. This is the world’s largest wildlife survey, with over half a million people regularly taking part each year see https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/birdwatch.

The data collected by this citizen science project is subsequently analysed and changing trends, both locally and nationally (like a growing number of wood pigeons and reed buntings and a falling number of sparrows & starlings), can be monitored and investigated.

I will post more information about birds visiting my garden,  next weekend, after I have spent my hour counting the feathered friends visiting my small patch of greenery in the town.