In message , Alan Johnson
writes
Sacha wrote:
On 8/1/09 12:26, in article , "Alan
Johnson" wrote:

Sacha wrote:
-6C here last night and a white start to the day.

snip

The birds are eating us
out of house and home and to our real pleasure, the long-tailed tits are
back. We saw them for the first time ever last year and then they
disappeared. But today they're back on the peanut feeder, vying for space
with the blue tits.

We also have a lot of birds in the garden, although I'm sorry to say
I'm not very good at identifying them yet. We put lots of food out for
them in this weather. Of those that I do recognise we have blue tits
and great tits, greenfinches, sparrows, robins, thrushes and
blackbirds. Last week I saw a hawfinch (had to look that and the
greenfinches up in my bird book). The crows and magpies appear to have
returned since last week and I was also surprised to see our regular
summer and autumn visitor, the woodpecker. I'm not sure what woodpecker
it is: it's grey and black with a red head, or red markings around the
head. There seem to be several that look vaguely similar.

snip

You seem to have a good variety of birds. Put out nyjer seed and you
will probably get the stars of the finches - the goldfinch & siskin.-
although I'd love to be able to attract bullfinches to our garden. We
see them occasionally but they're spectacularly shy. Your woodpecker is
almost certainly a Great Spotted Woodpecker. In Germany you normally
have 4 woodpeckers - Green, Great Spotted, Lesser Spotted and Black ....
we don't get the Black in the UK. You are very fortunate to have the
Hawfinch - relatively rare here. They usually travel in small groups
prefering tall deciduous trees like beech and oak (and cherries; they
crack to stones with their massive beaks). They also appear in old yew
trees - about a dozen or so caused quite a commotion when they visited
the churchyard in our small Dorset village a year or so ago. They stayed
about 2 months in the old yews and then disappeared. We had a fair
amount of twitchers coming to tick them off their list.
--
Gopher .... I know my place!