The message
from "ex WGS Hamm" contains these words:



I admit to being a softy. I have 3 bird tables and buy a sack of
sunflower
seed, a smaller bag of peanuts, and a sack of budgie seed at the start
of
winer. I mix them together with some of the mixed corn I feed my
chickens
on. The 2 sacks will cost around £20 and the peanuts around a fiver.
This
little lot will feed the wild birds all winter plus some safe scraps. I
also
buy fat balls which you can get very cheaply from £1 shops and QD and
wilkinsons.
On my weekly trips to the abbatoir for bones for my 7 dogs, I also get
a
carrier bag of fat which I hang on tree branches. That attracts dozens
of
starlings and blue tits.
To be honest a sack of wild bird mix will only cost around £9 and if
you
only have one bird table, that plus a few dozen fat balls will feed
hundreds
of birds and help them survive until next spring. They will reward you
with
beautiful songs and hours of entertainment through your winter on a cold
winters day :0)


The birds in your area must be few and far between. Mine scoff about a
half
a hundredweight of peanuts every two months, summer and winter @ £15 per
sack.
They also get seed and pigeon mix.
Must admit that the woodpecker family does account for the consumption of
a
considerable proportion of the nuts.
Don't know much obout beautiful songs though - the collar doves tend to
have
the same effect as cocks crowing first thing in the morning with their
coo-coo-cooing.
I have plenty of wild birds here but as I am in a very rural area I expect
they get feed from other sources like spilled grain, cattle feed etc. As
well as stealing the chicken food, they get the leavings from the parrot
feed pots and other suitable scraps. Not many trees in the fens so I don't
see woodpeckers. I get a wide variety of finches, thrush,
blackbird,robin,wren, doves of all kinds, starlings, sparrows etc.

I too live on th Fens and do get visited by Great Spotted Woodpeckers
from time to time. Last weekend one spent quite a long time tapping at a
wooden electricity pole as if it was a tree and then moved along and sat
on top of another pole simply calling and looking round for some time.
I get through several sacks of mixed bird seed and of sunflower seeds
each year. I haven't counted but I would guess at least six or seven of
each. Peanuts go down much more slowly than seeds here
Janet G