Garden Visitors

Every garden has visitors and ours is no exception.

Birds

We took part in the Big Garden Bird Watch in 2002 and spotted a number of different species despite the inclement weather. These photos were taken a few days beforehand on 24th January 2002 and it was snowing..
  • Pigeon
    • Very common in towns, need I say more.
  • Seagull
    • Properly called a Herring Gull, there are lots of seagulls in Dundee as it is on the coast.
  • Crow
    • Big, black and good at tidying up roadkill.
  • Starling
    • Brash, bold and travelling in large flocks. The bully of the bird world.
  • Blackbird
    • We have at least 5 pairs of Blackbirds in and around our garden. One female is quite distinctive as she has a white flash on her wing.
    • The male is black with a yellow beak.
    • The female is brown with a much paler beak
  • Mistle thrush
    • One of the bigger british thrushes, slightly larger than the blackbird. 
  • Dunnock
    • Often mistaken for a sparrow but is slightly smaller and has a longer more pointed bill. 
  • Robin
    • Seen on Christmas cards worldwide. Extremely terratorial so we have only seen a couple.
  • House Sparrow
    • We have many pairs around
  • Blue tit
    • A pair are looking seriously at the nest box in the apple tree
  • Coal tit
    • Spotted by the bird table camera. I have been told that this is a coal tit.

To encourage birds to visit our garden we have two bird tables, one by the back door and the other on the front of the house. Hopefully this will encourage more species to visit. The one at the front has a web cam on it.

Nest boxes

In 2003 we decided to put up a few nest boxes to encourage nesting birds. We intend next year to put a webcam in one of the boxes, but that will be next year.
We built three nest boxes. One has a hole the right size for blue tits and is located in the apple tree. We have already had some interested tits taking a closer look.

The other two nestboxes are designed for robins and sparrows respectively but don't seem to be in as good a location as we haven't seen any interest yet.

Update: A pair of bluetits are actively building a nest. Here are some video clips of them exiting the nest box. To get this close I used a technique called digiscoping where you put the camera behind a telescope (or in this case behind a pair of 6-18x binoculars) to get an extreme telephoto. The pictures were taken from 12m away.

18 May 2003: The latest picture of the nest box where the blossom is starting to fade but the birds are still in residence. I have no idea whether there are any eggs but nest material has been taken in some time ago.

24th May: There is a second pair of blue tits nesting in the garage box. I set up the camera and snarfed some video. It was too dim with the rain to get any decent still photos. I then played with iMovie and trimmed and packaged all the clips together. The result (my first attempt with iMovie) is here Warning: this is a 864Kb file.

martin-family@blueyonder.co.uk
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