More Nature Notes...Feeding the Birds....

            I remember the first time I fed wild birds. It was the summer of 1987. In the cupboard of our kitchen was a jar of chopped nuts that had remained untouched for about 2 years. I think they might have been bought for Christmas and subsequently ignored. I put them on the window ledge of my bedroom and they were gone within days devoured by blue tits, greenfinches, chaffinches and so on. I would look in wonder at these colourful little creatures from behind my curtain and I was hooked. Sometime later in the year, a plan was needed, however. Pigeons had discovered the food source and that was the end of that. Luckily, technology was on my side and every winter I would fix a plastic feeder - inaccessible to larger birds - to my window and wait. They always came and it was always the blue tits, first. You'd hear them before you saw them. I'll never forget the feeling of being in my bedroom and hearing their high-pitched call. They remain amongst my favourite birds.

            All these years later, moving to a flat with a large garden, the time was right to resume my support of my feathered friends and I have been doing so for the last two years. Feeding wild birds is slightly Machiavellian, in a way. Altruistic yet manipulative and self-serving. It costs time and money and goes beyond simply doing a good deed. It procures great pleasure and becomes almost an obsession. But a magnificent obsession, I’d say. There is, perhaps, a fine line between helping them out and making them dependant on you, but it’s probably too late. “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. As I say, its more than simply doing a good deed. It’s a relationship. A thirty-year relationship.

            So, more of the birds. The following are my regulars; blue tit, coal tit, great tit, robin, goldfinch, dunnock, woodpigeon, blackbird – the female is brown -, magpie. I see these birds every day. There are many others that I see less often, but one thing at a time. I have several feeders, all designed to feed birds and not squirrels. My pathological hatred of squirrels is of course, slightly irrational, but not entirely so. It’s not their fault, they’re just following their instinct, but they are a menace. I admire their athletic ability but I don’t like them. I feel the same way about modern footballers.

            My favourite feeder is perhaps the one that locks the minute the squirrel climbs onto it due to the weight of the animal. Ingenious. And there’s a nice democratic system in place. The smaller birds only can access the feeders, but the mess they make picking out the seeds, drops to the ground giving the collared doves, woodpigeons and blackbirds their fair share too. 

            Goldfinches are amongst the commonest visitors, certainly the most colourful and possibly the noisiest. Now, for me, as a teenager, a goldfinch was an exotic and distant bird. It was a bird of the country, not the west end of Glasgow. They are much commoner in the city these days, certainly, in London, almost certainly due to humans feeding them. That said, places like Hampstead Heath that I’m not too far from, will have the vegetation to support Goldfinches. Their favourite natural food is thistle seeds but some bright spark discovered that they will eat Nyger seeds. I’d never heard of Nyger seeds but on the packet it claimed they would attract goldfinches and this was too exciting a possibility to ignore. There was even a special feeder that allows the goldfinches’ beak to access the seed. Who discovered this? They must have had time on their hands. Anyway I was doubtful but literally within a couple of days they’d arrived and have never left. Extraordinary thing, Nature. How did they know?  Very beautiful birds but perhaps not the brightest. Constantly fighting with each other over the food source when there’s plenty to go round.

            For sheer personality, the award has to go to the Blue Tit. Pretty colours themselves but not exotic like a goldfinch. Cheeky, acrobatic and lively, they particularly like peanuts but also sunflower seeds and suet. Varying your food supply, of course, adds to your number and variety of visitors. And occasionally you might get a more unusual visitor or two. More of that and my other regulars next time. They all have a story worth telling…