No, not a post about the culinary delight I conjoured up yesterday for Sarah (butternut squash stuffed with bacon, blue cheese, garlic, creme fraiche and honey) although that was a bit of a milestone in my domestication \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
No, it’s a post about an unexpected bounty that our garden birds are reaping currently.\u00a0 I usually try to fill all of our bird feeders just as it’s getting dark, that way the birds don’t get disturbed (not that it seems to bother some of them – Coal Tits will often just move to slightly higher branches in the apple tree, Robins seem to have no problem sitting just a few feet away).\u00a0 Inevitably some seed gets spilled.\u00a0 There’s also a reasonable amount of seed on the ground because the Coal Tits will sit on the feeders and discard anything they don’t fancy at the time.\u00a0 With several days of snowfall over the last few weeks this was creating something that I hadn’t realised; layers of food sandwiched between each successive snowfall.\u00a0 Now that the thaw is well under way, although there is still plenty of snow down here on the low ground, these layers of chilled bird seed are being exposed.\u00a0 30 Chaffinches have been under the tree for most of today, and 8 Greenfinches have been around as well.\u00a0\u00a0 After a complete absence of sightings in recent weeks, a Great Spotted Woodpecker has returned to the garden. \u00a0At least one Brambling is still making sporadic appearances and the Blue, Coal and Great Tits are almost too numerous to count.\u00a0 As we’re feeding in parts of Choppington Woods, and some of our neighbours have well-stocked bird feeders we might expect numbers to decrease but\u00a0we’ve got more birds now than in the depths of the snow and ice\u00a0last week.\u00a0\u00a0Time to refill the feeders and dream of a rare thrush, bunting or accentor \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, not a post about the culinary delight I conjoured up yesterday for Sarah (butternut squash stuffed with bacon, blue cheese, garlic, creme fraiche and honey) although that was a bit of a milestone in my domestication \ud83d\ude09 No, it’s a post about an unexpected bounty that our garden birds are reaping currently.\u00a0 I usually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[132,823,46,118,102,35,101,25,45,75,825],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-choppington-woods-northumberland","tag-bird-feeding","tag-birdwatching","tag-blue-tit","tag-brambling","tag-chaffinch","tag-choppington-woods","tag-coal-tit","tag-great-spotted-woodpecker","tag-great-tit","tag-greenfinch","tag-northumberland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1056,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions\/1056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}