If you read the news, you'll know that bees are in trouble.  Bee species are in decline, not just honeybees, but our many species of bumblebee as well.  Two species have already become extinct in the UK.

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Many agricultural crops have their flowers almost entirely pollinated by bees, such as strawberries and raspberries and sunflowers. Some crops are ( Read more... )

 Yesterday, Mr and Mrs Blackbird brought their young in the garden. I spent several minutes watching Mr Blackbird trying to educate one of his children. It went roughly like this:

Mr Blackbird hops onto a flagstone and demonstrates how to bash a slug. Youngster watches with mild interest.

Mr Blackbird hops onto a new flagstone. "Look here, son, ( Read more... )

 Two weeks ago, my gooseberry bush had its tips covered in aphids.  Now, you have to look hard to find any aphids at all.

This is almost certainly due to the sparrows who have been searching the bush for useful food for their chicks.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth where it has
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 One of the delights of a wildlife-friendly garden is the baby birds.

This year, we have blue tits in the blue tit box, great tits in the sparrow box (first time it's ever been used - had it nearly a decade and the sparrows never showed any interest).

We also have baby goldfinches and sparrows.  We don't know where they nest, but the parents bring ( Read more... )

2011 (in spite of many other defining features) will almost certainly go down in family memory as the 'year of the goldfinch'.

If you look in bird books, you will discover that goldfinches rarely visit garden feeders, but can occasionally be tempted by niger seed feeders.

In the 30 years we've lived here, this has always been true - except that we ( Read more... )

We saw our first ever linnet in the garden today. We had to look it up to find out what it was, but it was very obliging and stayed on the feeder for several minutes.


( Read more... )

I found this to be absolutely amazing. Being a natural sceptic, I checked with Snopes.com  (the use of perspective on the legs suggested human input ( Read more... )

I'm afraid I haven't posted about the robins in the last few days as it's bad news ( Read more... )

I now know what a robin alarm call sounds like ( Read more... )

We've got babies - take a look here.

It's the first time I've ever actually seen a baby bird leave the nest.  Yesterday, I was amusing myself by watching dad (or possibly mum) great tit feed the babies.  I look out of the bedroom window at the nest box, watch parent depart over the roof of the house, sprint through to back bedroom, watch parent come ( Read more... )