The first thing I noticed about the Old Sheep Farm, when we first moved here (once all the initial chaos had subsided!) was the amazing array of birdlife. I constantly feel like the birds own the place, and we are just visitors. I admit, I don't know much about birds. We have a Collins Gem Guide to Birds, written in 1980, which I have been using to try to identify the amazing creatures zooming past our window. I assume not much has changed in the bird world since then, but perhaps some have gone extinct? Do birds get deprecated? Who knows.
Some of my favourites are the swallows. They arrived this year, from Africa, on Good Friday, and more and more are trickling in. They have their nests everywhere; in the stables, in our front porch, in the coal shed. Here is the very first bird to arrive this year, sitting on the telegraph wire and chatting away to himself. Its amazing to think how far he has just travelled:
The swallows graciously share the house nesting sites with the house martens, who set up residence in the eaves of the house.
On a trip to the stables with Willow (to find some hay to make a nest for her newly decorated Easter eggs...entertaining an 18-month old is hard!) we accidentally scared away a nesting song thrush. Thankfully she came back once we had gone. Look at these lovely blue eggs! Not entirely sure what that blurry thing is between the eggs. Best not to investigate too closely.
And here is mum - perhaps she is a mistle thrush? I can't tell!
We have had a bird feeder up with peanuts and fat balls in it outside our front room window for a while now. The most frequent visitors are the blue tits and great tits. They are like vultures. They take about ten peanuts a minute and are eating us out of house and home. A robin sometimes hangs about under the feeder, pecking at crumbs.
The occasional long-tailed tit also appears, looking fluffy and cute. The past few days I have seen goldfinches which look pleasingly exotic when we are bored of seeing bluetits!
The most exciting visitor to the bird feeder, however, is our Greater Spotted Woodpecker. He can decimate a fat ball in 30 seconds, then takes a peanut from the feeder and hides it in a hole in the telegraph pole next to the house. At the moment, you can always hear him hammering away somewhere in the trees, and occasionally, an extra-loud hammering when he pecks at the wooden structure of our corrugated iron shed.
We had redstarts last year, nesting in the eaves of the apple store, but in the summer we found 8 tiny chicks dead on the ground below the nest. We suspected a cuckoo (the calls of which we hear echoing across the valley)...I hope they have better luck this year!
We have a few bigger birds around here too. We have ravens soaring above us up into the mountains, croaking and swooping. We often have a buzzard or two, and of course a cacophony of tawny owls keep us awake at night. We've seen a grey heron a few times down by the river. Willow now announces "Heron, he look for fish and frogs, he think frogs YUMMY".
A buzzard (I think? I can only identify them in the air!) perched next to our house one evening:
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