Bird updates

Unfortunately, a bit of bad news on the bird front in our garden recently. About a month ago, we found that the robin nestbox at the end of the garden had fallen off its tree. A pair of robins had built a nest and layed eggs without us even noticing before the box fell off the tree, and the eggs were smashed It really is incredible how secretive the birds must have been to build a nest without us seeing birds enter the box once...

Whilst this nest has been a failure, I'm guessing this robin pair have nested again somewhere else successfully. We have a couple of young robins in the garden so they must have already had one brood earlier on in the year.

The birds have generally been feeding quite frequently recently, robins included. One of the species which has visited a lot has been the greenfinch, which has been good to see, because over the last 2 or 3 years we have generally seen fewer of them.

The greenfinches have been sharing the feeders very nicely though, and other birds like Blue Tits have been coming in to feed too.

Blackbirds have also been fairly frequent, and this female has been around all year. She seems to have distinctive markings...

The male blackbirds have been visiting too...

The video below shows a video of a greenfinch and a blue tit feeding together.

Over the last few weeks, I've been having problems loading my posts on blogger, so I've been unable to finally get this post done until now.

Getting used to an SLR

Over the last few months, I've been getting used to my new DSLR camera, and its been great fun. Just this week, I thought I would take some photos and video footage of various plants around our garden. I have just bought a 75-300mm lens, but I haven't really used it much yet, so I thought I would first share with you some of the stuff I have managed to capture with my 18-55mm kit lens.

One of the many reasons why I wanted the camera I now own, is because it is capable of capturing full HD video. This means that I won't have to buy a separate video camera. I have been experimenting with the video function for a while now, and I thought I would just share a few videos I have taken over the last few weeks. They aren't that great, but I'm still learning how to get decent footage.

I've found that the most practical size to capture the video is 720p, rather than 1080p, mostly because the file sizes are more manageable and also because most computers are unable to play 1080p video smoothly. Besides, on a small video player on my blog, the difference in quality between the two dimensions is pretty much unnoticeable.

The Alliums which have been growing near our bird feeders, have just finished flowering, but the video below shows one of the flowers a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, these flowers really attracted the bees...



Elsewhere in the garden, other flowers which we planted earlier in the year have also just finished flowering. We have had large areas of wild flowers towards the end of the garden (which we planted). Instead of showing you videos of these, I thought I'd show you some of the flowers from plants we didn't grow- basically, they're weeds...



And there's more...



When I had run out of flowers to video, I decided to get a quick video of the reflections on the bird bath...



Thats all for now, i'll probably post again either tonight or tomorrow with some more video footage. Anyway, enjoy any sunshine you get today, cause its looking pretty grey here at the moment!

Back soon

I know, its been a long time. A very long time. But, I will be back to posting regularly in a couple of weeks. Basically, being a year 11 student doesn't come without its problems. I've had loads of revision/coursework over the last few months. Although, to be honest, I will admit that, once I had left the blog for a while, I lost a little bit of motivation to post again. But, I WILL be back in a couple of weeks when my exams are finished, promise!

I have been keeping up with your blogs over the last months though, and WOW, its been interesting to see how spring has unfolded in various parts of the country. I'm sorry I haven't left any comments recently either, but again, I'll get back to that soon.

A lot has happened over the last few months in our garden. And it has been a shame not to be able to share it. Maybe a massive update post is in order in a couple of weeks. But for now, I'll just tell y'all what's been going on.

So, in the garden, we haven't seen a lot in the way of nesting birds. In fact, none of our nestboxes were used this year, despite our best efforts to place them all in the best spots. What we have seen, is a lot of fledglings in our garden, who have popped out of nests in gardens surrounding ours. The first fledglings we saw were Blue Tits. We have had a family of around 6 or 7 fledglings being fed by two parents. These were followed by noisy Starlings and Magpies, Robins, Dunnocks and Great Tits. It really has been busy. We still have Blackbird adults carrying insects off to various nests recently too, so maybe they will be next on the list.

Our plants also made the winter to spring transition a while back, and it was great to have planted a great deal more this year. We have grown much more veg this year, and it was great to plant a lot more flowers, shrubs etc. In fact, we have spent a LOT more time sorting stuff out in the garden this year than we have before, so its now the closest its ever got to looking neat. We've still left lots of wild messy bits though to attract the lizards and frogs.

As well as all this, I've made a camera upgrade in the last few months. I now have a Canon 500D SLR camera, which I had been looking forward to buying for a couple of years before. It really is a brilliant piece of kit. I have the 18-55mm kit lens, but I have now only just saved up for a 300mm lens for bird photos. I really look forward to taking some photos to share on this blog soon.

Even though I take about 10 GCSE subjects, I usually have more than one exam per subject, and so far I've taken 12 exams. 6 more to go over the next two weeks, so I'm off to revise some more in a minute. Once I've finished them all, I'll have loads of time for posting this summer. So stick around folks, more to come soon.