On 25/04/2016 16:12, Stephen Wolstenholme wrote:
On Mon, 25 Apr 2016 16:21:19 +0200, Martin wrote:

On Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:08:14 +0100, Malcolm Race wrote:

On 25/04/2016 12:49, David wrote:
Noticed the other week that blue tits were stealing the ends of the garden
twine used to tie up the olive trees to canes.

Today we realised that all the free ends had been gathered and they were
starting on the knots.

So we have tied some sacrificial bits of string near the important bits in
the hope that they'll take those instead.

I can't remember string disappearing in previous years.

Cheers

Dave R


Nesting material.Over the last 2 or 3 years I have watched tits and
other small birds pulling fibres from my hanging basket liners.

Magpies do it to ours. We tried putting fibre out for them but they ignore it.

A few years ago magpies stole a lot of my coir doormat to build their
nest.

Parakeets have stripped the leaves off the tops of our chestnut trees this year.
In previous years they only ate the candles.

Two parakeets use to come to my garden for peanuts but they
disappeared a few years ago. They are considered to be a problem in
London but not here.

Steve

This reminds me of a time many, many years ago when I was working on a
market garden outside Hastings. We had started to grow chrysanth blooms
and had put out string netting to grow the stems through, (No plastic in
those days).
Well a couple of months into the crop when the shoots were around 12
inches or so tall we went to move the netting up for the first time and
discovered large section of netting missing; I was going to say large
holes in the netting; we were at a loss to what had happened so had to
patch the netting with string.
It wasn't till we cleared the crop in the new year that we found the answer.
Mice, they had cut chunks out for nesting material.
After that we bought 8inch square wire netting.
David @an amazingly rain free side of Swansea Bay.