Feeding a hunger for garden wildlife

ONCE I had a bird table but it was involved in a fatal accident with a runaway lawnmower. I didn’t bother replacing it because I keep poultry and whenever I feed the hens and ducks flocks of wild birds descend and pinch their rations.

But a couple of weeks ago I had a change of heart. I was in a garden centre and, on impulse, I bought a kit containing various feeders and wild bird foods.

I hung everything up a few metres outside the kitchen window. I figured this way I would be able to enjoy watching the birds at close range and the special mixtures of wild bird food might appeal to species that were not getting the benefit of stolen poultry rations.

Feeling rather pleased I put a chair beside the kitchen window and sat down to wait. Of course nothing happened. In fact, nothing happened for three days.

Then early one morning I walked into the kitchen and there was a flash of wings as something unidentifiable whizzed off the peanut feeder. I put the chair back and sat down with a cup of coffee. Within minutes the bird returned nervously. A coal tit.

I have always thought of the coal tit as the dowdy member of the family. It lacks the bright yellow and black of the great tit, the amazing colour of the head of a blue tit and the wash of pink on the long-tailed tit. Now, watching one at close range, I changed my mind.

The plumage of this bird was subtle, not drab. It dressed with better taste than its rather garish cousins. It was also very acrobatic and obviously both intelligent and courageous to be the first bird to discover and use my installation.

I kept an eye on it during the day and it slowly began to dawn on me that it was more than one coal tit. There was only one there at any given time but the amount of peanuts being consumed was far beyond the capacity of one individual bird as small as this.

The next character on stage was the resident robin. He wasn’t that interested in the food, he just wanted to chase off the coal tits. But the amount of chasing involved burnt up a lot of energy so eventually he started pecking the odd beak full off a ball of fat and seeds to keep his strength up.

Robins are certainly the most aggressively territorial of all our common garden birds. Most territorial birds only defend their patch against birds of their own species and many of them only bother to do it during the breeding season. But robins are different — it’s all birds all the year round as far as they’re concerned.

But I have learnt over the past few days that size does matter to robins. The nearer a bird is to their own size the more excitable they get. They’ll tolerate wrens and blackbirds but they hate great tits.

This was tough for my robin because the next birds to discover the feeders were a pair of great tits. I believe that birds must spend quite a lot of time watching the behaviour of other birds. I’m pretty sure that none of the birds round here have seen bird feeders before and that the great tits must have spotted the behaviour of the coal tits and flown over to investigate.

The next day blue tits arrived in slightly drab winter plumage. Being small, they got bullied. And this morning a male house sparrow carried out a reconnaissance flight. It’s all happening at last.

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