The message
from "Kate" contains these words:

I am not going to bother any more. I spend a lot of money on
proprietary foods and also make my own, but all we get in the garden
are pigeons and starlings. Occasionally a robin and a couple of
blackbirds will deign to visit, and now and again a blue tit, but
that`s it. The peanuts shrivel, the sunflower hearts get damp from
condensation and go mouldy - and so on and so on. As I mentioned in
an earlier post, I think our garden is bird-friendly, but the birds
just aren`t friendly to us. When I remember the varieties we used to
get in the garden when we lived in the Fens, I get very downhearted.
Admittedly, our quarter-of-an-acre garden there was an oasis in the
middle of intensively-farmed arable fields, but we didn`t put much
food out and we had : robin, blackbird, blue tit, great tit, wren,
fieldfare, yellow wagtail, pied wagtail, turtle dove, cuckoo
(youngsters that gorged on the hairy caterpillars bivouaced in the
hawthorn hedge), pheasant, partridge (I had a `pet` partridge who
would sit on my shoulder like a parrot!), warbler, greenfinch, linnet,
house sparrow and even a black redstart passing through. We had
hares, shrews, and stoats in the garden and horseshoe bats in the
roof. As I suggested before, I think there are too many people
feeding too few birds where we live now, but I can`t think of anything
else we could do to entice them, so I`m admitting defeat.

Kate

I live on the Fens and that sounds much like my own list except that
warblers, though appearing occasionally, are quite rare visitors and
cuckoos have declined in the last five years. We have been getting both
green and lesser spotted woodpeckers quite regularly this year, using
the telegraph poles as trees, and I have seen goldcrests several times
in the last few weeks. We also get quite a lot of goldfinches (they were
feeding very noisily on alder cones this week), dunnocks and a good
population of tree sparrows.
We used to have yellowhammers six or seven years ago and the occasional
whitethroat in the hedge but neither has been in the garden for a while.
Others have mentioned siskins and coal tits which I have never seen
here. Would that be lack of mature trees perhaps?

What a pity to have to admit defeat after having been used to a good
range of bird and other life, but it does sound as if you've ried
everything.

Janet G