Gopher wrote:

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,

In the summer we have even more bird varieties. I'll have to seriously
try and identify more of them. I've only seen the Hawfinch once ot twice
before. It was that big beak that gave it away. We chopped down a number
of trees but we have a lot of hazel in our garden and the neighbour's -
that's what seems to attract the woodpecker. We also have a cherry tree,
but I don't think that's what attracted the Hawfinch last week... :-)
You're right, though, it'll be a Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Thanks and regards

--
Alan Johnson, Geotr@ns
www.geotrans-online.de
German-English, Geosciences/Technical
http://geotransblog.blogspot.com/
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