Even at this busy time of year, for me, I still find time to be amazed at what goes on amongst the birds in and around my small garden. And, day by day, I still end up seeing new things, which pose more questions than answers, despite seven decades of bewildered observation on my part.
The interactions between the twenty or so species that visit my garden on a more or less regular basis continue to fascinate me. It seems this summer birds have been much more frequent visitors than in previous years. Could this be due to the unseasonably cold spring we have just had, leading to scarcity of food out there? It seems likely. Although the experts have advised against it, I have continued to put out bread, suitably chopped up, and birds like starlings, house sparrows, even chaffinches, and the occasional carrion crow and magpie, have been scooping it up by the beakful to take to their young. This is why the experts don't like it, arguing that it is not an ideal food for growing nestlings. This may well be so, but surely when food is scarce it is better than nothing.
In my defence, the bread that I put out is the same craft-baked bread that I buy for myself, or indeed from the loaves that I make from whole grain flour, and not the sliced white blotting paper that masquerades as bread in the supermarkets. Certainly my garden seems suddenly full of young birds as I write, from squawking starlings, to a family of speckled somewhat dishevelled, spotted robins, like animated brown balls of fluff with shoe-button velvety-black eyes.
Needless to say, a bowl full of bread attracts more than its share of wood pigeons, which spend the time when they are not greedily wolfing it down until their crops are visibly distended, in fighting over access to it. The aggressive starlings will gang up to dislodge one of the pigeons. Just a couple, and the pigeon retaliates with half-hearted but ineffectual pecks. Soon by sheer weight of numbers it is dislodged, and the starlings take over, casting bread scraps to the four winds, as they feed.
Blackbirds and many others will move aside when a wood pigeon waddles in, yet I have seen one of these large birds flee in terror from a tiny house sparrow that it has managed to upset. On one occasion I saw the tail of a collared dove, in headlong flight, tweaked by a pursuing sparrow. The so-called 'pecking order' is as strongly observed in my garden as it is in any fowl run, I can assure you, often with unsuspected results
Although the senses of birds are much more highly attuned than ours, they do sometimes make mistakes. On occasion these may be fatal, as in the cases where they collide with large windows. Pigeons again seem to be prone to doing this. Where they are merely stunned they may leave behind a ghostly imprint of their body feathers on the window. I once watched two carrion crows fly up either side of a roof, to collide heavily at the ridge. Both were momentarily stunned, and rolled down the roof like movie stunt men, or even better like a footballer seeking to attract the referee's attention. They both soon recovered to fly off, if somewhat unsteadily.
Aside from the various nuts etc in the feeders, I also put out porridge oats for the birds. It took a little while for them to become accustomed to what must have been a novel food at first, but now most of them eat it greedily. Especially birds like robins, dunnocks, and song thrushes seem to like it.
My next door neighbour has just put up a seed feeder in her tree. Within a few days I noticed the chaffinches, sparrows, and the tits had discovered it. Contrast this with when I first put up feeders many years ago. No-one else nearby was feeding the birds, and weeks went by before they started to visit on a regular basis. It seems to me that they learn the shape of the feeders, and to associate them with food.
My rhubarb this year is the best ever! In past years it has quickly become stringy and hardly worth pulling, other than for winemaking. I have already cooked and sugared enough to freeze in tubs, to keep the family and I in delicious pies and crumbles through next winter.