The feeders in our garden have been busier in the last couple of days than at any time during this winter.\u00a0 No less than 6 Blackbirds have taken up residence, 3 or 4 Robins are posturing and defending territories, a steady stream of Blue, Great and Coal Tits, along with our\u00a02 regular Willow Tits,\u00a0are emptying the feeders rapidly and a flock of 8 Long-tailed Tits are putting in\u00a0daily appearances.\u00a0 Chaffinch numbers are way down on previous winters, but Greenfinches are now almost ever-present during daylight hours and three pairs of Bullfinches are never far away.\u00a0 It’s interesting that, even on a very\u00a0short-distance scale, there’s such a noticeable movement of birds from their ‘normal’ habitat (Choppington Woods) to the gardens around the edge of the woods whenever the weather turns colder.\u00a0 Birdwatching doesn’t get any easier than sitting in the kitchen, glass of port in one hand and a slice of Christmas cake in the other \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
First thing this morning everything was frozen solid again.\u00a0 However, by lunchtime when\u00a0Martin\u00a0took Dad to the railway station there was a noticeable thaw – even though the thermometer was showing the temperature having only just crept above freezing.\u00a0 Then it started to rain and most of the remaining patches of ice and snow vanished.\u00a0 The birds were still around in the numbers of recent days though and, if the weather forecasts are anything to go by, we’re in for some more very hard winter weather\u00a0at the end of this\u00a0year and the start of the new one.\u00a0 Wrap up warm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The feeders in our garden have been busier in the last couple of days than at any time during this winter.\u00a0 No less than 6 Blackbirds have taken up residence, 3 or 4 Robins are posturing and defending territories, a steady stream of Blue, Great and Coal Tits, along with our\u00a02 regular Willow Tits,\u00a0are emptying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,98,107],"tags":[823,46,27,102,101,45,75,121,28],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-choppington-woods-northumberland","category-family-and-friends","tag-birdwatching","tag-blue-tit","tag-bullfinch","tag-chaffinch","tag-coal-tit","tag-great-tit","tag-greenfinch","tag-long-tailed-tit","tag-willow-tit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":969,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions\/969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}