Garden updates

I try not to mix up my posts on the plants, bird and wildlife in my garden too much but there is so much going on at the moment. Everyone is the same at this time of year I am quite sure. It is a busy time in the garden. My Nestbox videos of yesterday have now been processed and if you scroll below you see them but first to a very special plant in the garden…

Photos of wisteria in the stages before flowering are regularly searched for on the internet. This is such a wonderful plant to have flower in your garden. This will be my third year of flowers and I am thrilled. I hope the photo above helps if you are looking for flowers on yours.

You can see that the flower racemes are getting longer and the leaves are beginning to open behind them. We have had a warm spell recently and today it is raining, much needed for the garden plants now, so I would guess this will help them grow a bit further before they open their tiny flowers along the racemes.

Close-up photos are great for details of plants and I regularly use montages to show this. However, yesterday I posted photos of my garden as well as my Nestbox update. There you will see the plants that are surrounding my wisteria too.


Photos of hedgehogs are also being searched for at the moment and our juvenile has been back searching for food once again. The photo above is from a video capture which I will post one day soon. There is an interesting story to go with this one!

If you have a hedgehog visiting your garden remember to leave water out for them as well as food. I have found they like peanuts and sultanas in my garden.

Juvenile birds are now regularly visiting my garden. I have seen a woodpigeon, greenfinch and siskin. I am also seeing rows of queuing house sparrows and starlings on branches of trees. They are very noisily waiting to be fed by their parents. However, the starling juveniles don’t really care who feeds them and have been seen sitting next to the juvenile house sparrows opening their beaks looking for them to feed them!! The house sparrows have just shuffled along the branches but the starlings are seriously persistent birds! I really must try and get some video of this.

The blue tit chicks in my camera Nestbox and the plight of the female to single handily feed them is definitely the hottest news in my garden at the moment – despite the noise that the starlings are making as I write this. As it is overcast and raining today the image from my camera Nestbox is showing in black and white so it is difficult to make out the tiny chicks. I can see that one egg is certainly still there. I will update this post with numbers at the end of the day.

I am delighted to finally show some Nestbox video from yesterday and the night before. I’ll start with two short ones first. You can see how the chicks wriggle for space in the nest with their flopsy little bodies trying with all their might to lift their heads. The second video shows the female demolishing the egg shell of a hatched chick. She eats this as it gives her calcium – I don’t know how she knows this. I didn’t speed up this clip at all – she clearly had no time to waste!





The next video has not been edited - except with music. It was taken on Monday night at 9pm and lasts about three minutes. In this case I am not going to tell you what happens next...



What you saw in this video was me giving a food drop to the female via a folded piece of card acting as a chute. I hoped that she would see the small suet sprinkles as a possible food source for the chicks and herself. What happened next? She came back and took another piece of food then returned with food for her chicks and then she did the same again. It clearly gave her some much needed energy. This looked like I could help her. Now, here’s the tricky one – would I advise anyone to try this?

DEFINITELY NOT! Yesterday morning I tried the same again but looked for a different way of doing this. I thought a tube would work better. However it was a little large for the hole and I didn’t get the angle right. Once again I tried this only when the female was in the nest. If she had seen me from the outside she may not have returned and that would have been disastrous!

I quickly went for the card I had used the night before. I have to say that I had help with someone looking in the Nestbox as I did this. I didn’t get the angle of the card right either as I was desperately trying to be quick. Some pieces went in but I decided to leave it. I also had a signal from inside that I should stop.

I came inside the house and the female came out of the Nestbox and spent the next five minutes checking out all the areas of the roof before returning to her chicks. I have seen her fight off predators before – surprise, surprise the starlings! Although I wasn’t comfortable being the predator. Although I wanted to help her clearly this was a risky thing to do and I would strongly advise that you don’t try this. You can see why when you look at the video below which I am showing in case anyone else is considering doing this.



What can I do now? Well, as I have been writing this the postman has come with a very special delivery of live mini mealworms. I don’t relish opening the box! It was a Bank Holiday yesterday so my 'next day' delivery is later than I hoped. If it had come yesterday I would not have tried adding more sprinkles to the nestbox.

Anyway, my plan now is to try and leave a few scattered mealworms in corners and edges on the ground and some also near my ivy without the starlings catching sight of them! An impossible task perhaps but I have to try. Before I do that I am going out for more supplies of sunflower hearts which the starlings will eat greedily but perhaps it will stop them finding the mealworms. The blue tits and other birds are looking the sunflower hearts too. Ah… but maybe the rain today will make the insects move about and the blue tit will find them more easily. I hope so.

Finally, on the positive side the female is still finding food at the moment and I do believe the chicks are growing a little. When the last eggs hatch she will be out and about more. I wonder if we will see last night's blue tit, seen drinking at my pond, again today. Ah... what a journey our garden can take us if we look more closely.

All photos and video above were taken in my garden during May 2008.