On 29/10/04 12:04, in article , "Kay"
wrote:

In article , Sacha
writes
On 28/10/04 20:10, in article , "Kay"
wrote:


Kay, I'm not sure why but you seem to be stretching this to some rather
obscure limits. You were at my house for about 24 hours but seem to feel
able to make a judgment about the area and conditions.

Well, even in 24 hours I was able to judge that a) the ex-hedge was
along the front of the garden - not a hard judgement - you told me! ;-)
b) that the lane was considerably quieter than suburban Leeds. c) there
was an awful lot of countryside around

Or did I get that wrong? ;-)

No but you seem to be suggesting that passing traffic - pedestrain, if I
understand you correctly - would have frightened the birds out of what was a
very dense hedge (these had been allowed to spread outwards a lot as well as
upwards)

You're thinking
'people'? 'People' what? Are you now saying that people walking past,
people on horseback, people walking dogs are going to frighten the local
bird population out of the trees? I repeat that birds were to be found in
neighbours' trees and in my other trees but not in the leylandii hedge. It
was something I particularly remarked because it puzzled me.

Precisely - it puzzled me too. And I'm trying to explore why. You, I
think, put it down to the lack of utility of leylandii to wildlife, but
that is in contrast to my experience, which is that it's not brilliant,
but neither is it barren.

To be honest, I don't put it down to anything because I can't really
understand it. Here was a very dense, high hedge which one would think was
the *perfect* cover but it really did lack all signs of nesting or even much
perching. In fact, when it was felled, to be on the safe side, I asked the
man doing it to choose a time out of the nesting season - obviously - and
even asked him if he found any nests. Not one, was the answer. But in the
house next door which had a big walnut tree on the same lane and another
just behind the first, there were lots of birds perching and nesting.


So why do I get birds in leylandii when you
don't? My first thought is 'your hedge borders a road' ..... but it's an
incredibly quiet road - do you get many people walking past? (birds
don't worry much about cars) .... but again, maybe even a *quiet* road
is to be avoided in a rural area where there's lots of choice, whereas
my poor suburban birds have to take what they can get.

Sorry if I didn't fill in all the links in my thinking - I thought you'd
follow where I was coming from.

Not really because my experience with birds here at Hill House is so
different and my experience of 'birding' in England is very limited. As I
say, the hedge by the tearoom which isn't as high or as dense a the old
leylandii hedge I had, is a haven for sparrows but has people walking up and
down that path umpteen times a day. The birds that zoom in and out of the
green houses don't seem to care a damn for people or dogs. The only thing
that has made them disappear lately is a sparrowhawk which tried and failed
to catch one eating crumbs just outside the greenhouse door and then had the
brass nerve to 'hide' among some large pots to try to have another go.


The point is that I saw NO birds nesting or even perching for long, in the
thick leylandii hedge that I had in that particular house - a hedge you
never saw, BTW - nor in the smaller hedge I had in a previous house.

I know. And that's puzzling, because I do get birds. And although it's
not a favourite tree, it is a favourite, in our garden, of the goldcrest
which isn't well catered for elsewhere in the garden.


Well, we have ivy and euphorbia and lots of wrens, so I'll keep my eyes
open. We have more than a few conifers in this area but I haven't seen these
little birds.

Do you get flocks of long tailed tits coming through? They like conifers
too, and also seem to like birch trees. I think they're my favourite
birds. You don't always see them immediately, but you hear them, and
that moment when you realise they're all around you is magical.

Hmmm, again, not that I know of. We have lots of sparrows, blue tits,
wrens, tree creepers, great tits, the odd bullfinch, collared doves, wood
pigeons, thrushes, masses of blackbirds, some greenfinches, a lesser spotted
woodpecker, sparrowhawks, blast 'em, rooks, chaffinches, Little owls, robins
and jackdaws. What I have noticed in the 5 years I've known this place, is
a considerable decline in bird numbers but we have no idea why.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds to email me)