Lovely clear photo @coccinella. Don't worry about it being too early for your bees. The huge Sarcococca in Sheffield Botanical Gardens was absolutely covered in honey bees in January!
Clay soil - Cheshire/Derbyshire border. I play with plants and soil and sometimes it's successful
Just saw a large buzzard flying quite low down over Norwich ring road opposite Notcutt’s GC. … it was being harried by a crow that normally nests in a tall cedar by the car park.
We get a lot of buzzards over us here, but that’s the furthest in towards the city centre that I’ve seen one.
I'm not sure about your side of the country but there seems to be a lot less road kill about this year. Locally I think fewer pheasants have been released this season so they're not playing in traffic as much as normal. I don't know if this is to do with bird flu risk or other factors but I've been wondering if it will force scavengers to look for food over a wider range.
Good news locally. The Welsh Government got in trouble for buying a farm to host the Green Man Festival but ospreys then chose that location for their first nest in South Wales for 200 years. As a Schedule 1 Protected Species there are limits to the activity that can happen near the nest site so festivals are a definite no go. It's been touted as a fiasco for the Government but I see it as nothing but a good thing. Local people have everything crossed that the birds return there to breed this year. If they keep coming back it will be a great asset for tourism and sustainable farming.
Fantastic news for the ospreys @wild edges I’m a bit of an osprey fanatic and spend far too many hours between April and September watching osprey cams, especially the Loch Arkaig ospreys, I’m already counting down the days until they return!
I'm hoping they set up some viewing options for this one if they return. The farm's only about 10 miles from here as the osprey flies so if they set up a viewing hide I'd be there all the time. I saw that a local group had set up a talk about it all but tickets were sold out before I could book any.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
We had a goldfinch on our sunflower seed feeder today! Have hardly seen any in the twenty years we’ve lived here. Lots of other interesting stuff, nuthatches, Siskins, long tailed tits, bullfinches and greater spotted woodpeckers are regular visitors. In our previous home, we had charms of more than twenty goldfinches at a time on the nyger seed feeder, but never managed to attract them here. I’ve never seen a sparrow in our garden, or a starling, yet we have dunnocks, wrens, robins, goldcrests and blackbirds aplenty. Plus tawny owls. Just seems strange.
It’s a similar story in our garden @Ergates, we have all the birds you mention including goldfinches, although their numbers seem to have dropped this year, but I’ve never seen a starling in the garden.
Until last spring I’d never seen a house sparrow either but a pair suddenly appeared and raised a brood in our blue tit box. We were so pleased, they were really entertaining to watch when they were raising their young and the pair have now taken up residence in the garden.
In my previous garden, which was only about 1 mile away but in a much more built area, I had a resident flock of about 40 sparrows but I didn’t get many other birds. I even used to get a neighbour to come in to restock the feeder daily as they seemed so reliant on me!
I wonder if sparrows and starlings prefer a more built up area as they are very social birds? I know they sparrows like to nest next to other sparrows. Are you more rural?
I am rural @CatDouch and have a flock of House Sparrows visiting the bird feeder, but only a single Starling. The odd Chaffinch and Greenfinch, but rarely the Goldfinch. Dunnocks and Blackbirds a plenty, and a pair of Collered Doves. Plus Blue, Great, and Longtail Tits. In Lincolnshire. The sky above the village has been taken over in the last two years by Red Kites, pushing out the Buzzards.
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A little early perhaps 🤔.
Luxembourg
I play with plants and soil and sometimes it's successful
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I never even knew these existed.
The sky above the village has been taken over in the last two years by Red Kites, pushing out the Buzzards.