Local Wildlife

Fran and Keith's Garden Feeders

by Fran Slade, January 2011

The world is inhabited by more than nine thousand species of bird and no other group of animals arouses our interest so much, their colours and songs and the way that many of them come to garden feeding tables make it easy for us to observe their antics, but unfortunately due to pollution and the introduction of pets, i.e. cats, and habitat destruction more than one in ten of the world’s bird species are considered by the International Council for Bird Preservation to be threatened or endangered

My husband and I keep a yearly check list of birds seen and starting on January 1st this year we saw:- Blackbird, Robin, Coal Tit, Chaffinch, Siskin, Great Tit, Dunnock, House Sparrow, Pied Wagtail, Goldfinch, Starling, Greenfinch and Blue Tit, feeding from sunflower hearts in three feeders, niger seeds, peanuts, fat balls, and suet pellets with seeds and insects in them, so of course it is no wonder that we get so many different birds, we also took a walk along Bude canal and saw another 16 species, so on the 1st of January 2011 we saw 29 different species all told, to date as at 9th January we have seen 48 different species, and some of the more unusual ones are Gadwall, Coot, Tufted Duck, Black Tailed Godwit, Nuthatch and Redwing, and just before Christmas we had a Brambling come to feed with the Chaffinch in our garden, and on the Bude Marshes we saw a Red Breasted Merganser. Last year our total was 91 different species of birds, all seen locally