Summer caters for chaffinches with caterpillar

THESE DAYS I fill the peanut feeder at the bird table only a quarter full. Otherwise, jackdaw gangs arrive and take turns hacking at the mesh, breaking the nuts into scraps which fall on the grass where team mates gobble them up.

With only two inches of nuts at the bottom of the feeder, even the agile, upside-down-foragers can’t manage the knack of getting the scraps to fall clear, so they give up and the small birds get a chance of a meal.

Strangely, a pair of chaffinches are regular peanut clients. While chaffinches eat seeds in winter, at this time of year, they usually survive and feed their young almost exclusively on bugs. This makes life easy and makes them useful garden birds.

So abundant is the summer supply of caterpillars and winged insects that they hardly have to stir more than yards from the nest to get a meal. The male has no need to feed the female; she takes regular breaks from incubating the eggs and finds her own food within a few feet of her doorstep. There is no ‘food bonding’ as with many other species, although the male does share in feeding the young.

The abundance of invertebrates allows the birds to bring beaks full of food to the nest every few minutes. There are millions of creepy-crawlies on the trees and in the undergrowth, albeit rarely seen.

In summer, I sometimes amuse small grandchildren by hanging an open umbrella upside down on a tree branch and shaking the branch vigorously.

A neat umbrella, light in colour is preferable — their mother’s Gucci umbrella is ideal. The ‘catch’ can be fascinating, and startling. The girls pull faces and make disgusted noises, but are every bit as enthusiastic as the boys. Different trees yield different caterpillars; some look like twigs or leaves. Peabodies, black woodlice that curl into perfect shiny globes, are often a feature. They can be nudged with the fingertip, and will roll down slopes at speed. There are spectacular spiders to be discovered, and shiny, spacey millipedes.

A book of garden wildlife is a great standby for amusing visiting grandchildren in summer. It gets us all out of doors, and I suppose they learn something about nature, at least that it is there, unseen, all around them, and probably has a role in keeping the grass growing, the flowers blooming and the birds singing. Apart from naming the creatures, I rarely know much about them but if required I can look them up, and one grandson in particular is especially interested in all that crawls on trees and lives under stones.

The other finch common in most gardens, the greenfinch, has a harder time than the chaffinch in feeding its young. Greenfinches eats seeds all year, and seeds are not as easy to come by as insects. A greenfinch pair must range over a wide area, and intervals between meals for the nestlings may be lengthy. The seeds are swallowed and regurgitated by the parents; perhaps they would be too hard for the chicks to digest otherwise also, of course, greenfinches have no pockets, so there is no other way of carrying the food with them until they have enough to make the return journey to the nest worthwhile.

I’m not surprised to see greenfinches picking away industriously at the feeder. Sometimes, in winter, there may be up to 20 at once, while there is rarely more than a pair of chaffinches, or two pairs, with regular belligerence between the males. The average garden rarely holds more than one pair. In spring, the male stakes out territory, singing aggressively to warn off other males and to attract a female. Once the pair is bonded, woe betide the interloping male.

Greenfinch pairs don’t hold territory, and they often nest in small colonies. They are social, co-operative birds, foraging together; like the jackdaws, they travel in gangs. They are tough customers at the bird table, displaying and pecking aggressively at rivals, chaffinches included. Robust birds, their dark eyes on either side of the dark beak gives them the appearance of wearing eye masks, like comic-book villains.

Ponds are another great source of interest for said grandchildren, or streams that contain stickleback or minnows. These we catch, decant into clear plastic bags, enjoy watching and then pour back into the stream. We catch eels sometimes too — “bootlace eels”, I call them, because they are long, black and thin. I’m a dab hand at catching baby eels and never fail to impress five-year-olds. Crayfish are also found in certain streams, although we find these more often in rivers.

* Garden Wildlife by Michael Chinery Collins Nature Guides.