Monday, June 22, 2009
The modern theory is that you should continue feeding wild birds throughout the year and not stop during the breeding season, which was the earlier advice.
I’ve discovered this gives you a good idea of the breeding success of the various species in the garden.
I have a twiggy branch screwed to my bird table. A couple of weeks ago I noticed a juvenile house sparrow perched on the branch. It squatted down, whirred its wings, put its head back and opened its beak very wide. This is classic food-begging behaviour. I’m sure it was also making plaintive noises indicating how hungry it was, but I couldn’t hear these through the window.
An adult female sparrow, presumably its mother, obliged by extracting a seed from the feeder and popping it into the gaping maw.
I was pleased to see this because up until about a year ago house sparrows were rare visitors to the garden and they seem to be a species that’s in decline. So evidence that a local pair had successfully reared a first brood was good news.
The young of most of the commoner garden birds are often the same size as adults, but have duller and dowdier versions of their plumage. There’s an obvious evolutionary reason for this. They are camouflaged to protect them from predators while they’re at a vulnerable age. We have sparrow hawks round here.
The principal exception to this rule is the robin. Young robins are speckled brown birds, quite unlike their grey and orange parents.
Over the next few days I saw quite a few more juvenile birds coming to the bird table. Young greenfinches quickly learned to extract bits of peanut from the tubular feeder. This was also good news as greenfinches are another species that has been steadily declining in numbers in my garden. I believe, based partly on emails from readers of this column, that they have been suffering from an epidemic disease. So seeing healthy young birds is a hopeful sign.
The young goldfinches that are now visiting the niger seed feeder are similar to their parents but have less red on their faces. In adult goldfinches the males have the really big red patch and the females have a slightly smaller one that doesn’t extend back behind the eye. Young birds of both sexes have just a little dot of red on their faces.
I think it must have been the spell of fine weather we had in May that has resulted in a successful first brood for many species of garden bird. Fledgling birds are very susceptible to hypothermia if it rains while their parents are out foraging to get food for them.
The chaffinches have also had a good breeding season. I have a healthy population of them, but up to now they’ve avoided using the bird table. They seemed shy of the other birds and confined themselves to hopping around on the ground and picking up scraps.
But this year an adult male and female seem to have lost all their shyness and have brought their young to the bird table where they seem unconcerned by all the hustle and bustle. I have seen the female feeding her offspring, though never the male, but the young birds are quite capable of foraging for themselves. They’re not good at clinging to the feeders, but they lorry into the loose feed scattered on the surface of the bird table.
Most of these birds will attempt a second, or even a third brood. So let’s hope the fine weather continues.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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