OVER the past weeks, I have been writing a lot about feeding wild birds. This is your fault, because, every time these articles appear, I get a stack of emails from readers who are obviously interested in the subject.
A Cork reader recently bought her first house, and, immediately afterwards, her first bird table. Her problem: "The crows are landing on it in droves and frightening off the little birds."
This is common and not easy to solve. One solution is to surround the bird table with chicken wire, with a mesh large enough to let the little birds through, but not the larger ones. This works, but it doesn’t look great and may cause problems when you want to renew the food.
The green plastic netting sold to support pea and bean plants looks better, but is harder to fix in place. You can get the same result using bushy branches with twigs thin enough to support the weight of small birds.
I built my own bird table and I kept it small — 30 centimetres square. In the middle of it is an upright branch I pruned off a sumac tree. The twigs can support small birds and light bird-feeders, only. I deliberately made a difficult landing area for rooks, jackdaws, and pigeons. This has worked, and, so far, the largest bird I have seen on it is a starling, and it was awkward and uncomfortable.
A reader in south Dublin is concerned about declining numbers of greenfinches. He has noticed a number of sick birds and picked up some dead ones, which he has stored in his freezer in the hope of finding someone to do a post-mortem.
He writes: "After doing a little research on the internet, a disease called trichomoniasis might be the culprit, but, not being a vet, it is only a guess … without any doubt, the greenfinch is in trouble, as I have had the same news from a friend in Wicklow." The reader would like to know if other people have noticed the same thing, and so would I. However, I’ve had other emails from readers with healthy populations of greenfinches in their gardens, and, the day after I wrote the article, which questioned their absence at my own bird table, one appeared on it. But I only saw it twice.
Another reader puts forward a theory to explain the decline in numbers of house sparrows. He lives on a large, suburban housing estate and writes: "in the past 10 to 15 years, 90% of the houses have had their guttering replaced with plastic, seamless guttering. The sparrows used to nest in the old guttering, but had no access as soon as they were replaced." Another email is on the subject of goldfinches hogging the peanut feeder. They are delightful birds, with probably the most attractive plumage of any species likely to visit a bird table, but, if they discover a source of peanuts, they tend to get aggressive about it. They arrive in numbers and the blue tits don’t stand a chance.
The reader’s solution? "Get them their own feeder. It costs only slightly more than the usual type. And the seed is called Nyger seed, tiny black seeds that they love; then they will ignore the other feeders."
I want to try this; the only trouble is that many shops are reducing the variety of wild bird food they sell, as spring advances, and, though I saw this seed for sale during the winter, I am now finding it hard to source.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Sunday, March 16, 2008
