November garden birds

Its been a while since I last posted and I had some time last weekend to go out and take a few photos of the garden birds. Recently, I've had lots of school work (doing A levels now), and with the dark evenings at this time of year, its only really possible to get out taking photos at the weekend. It was quite bright on Saturday morning, so it was a lot easier to take photos.

Blue tits were the first to arrive to find the newly filled feeders, as they usually are. I downloaded the free trial of Adobe Photoshop last week, and I've been experimenting with minor adjustments. The photos below were taken in raw format and then processed in Photoshop. I was quite pleased with how the photos came out...

The other birds arrived soon after, although they didn't really stay for long, and I only managed shots of them on the seed feeder. Below is a male chaffinch and a female house sparrow...

The blue tits came back again, along with a coal tit...

But by far the most exciting sight of the weekend was on Sunday. I looked out of the back door window to see a Jay on the bird table. I only managed a few record shots, as I didn't want to get too close. We have had one in the garden before, but they really don't stay for long so it was good to get a glimpse of one again. It eventually got scared off by a magpie, but before that, I managed this record shot...

I'll probably post again this weekend if I can. I'm assuming the snow won't reach this far south but I'm sure it won't be long until I'm posting about that again. Have a great week :)

Sparrowhawk in garden again

This morning topped off a very interesting weekend of garden wildlife. After the chiffchaff, goldcrest, fox and sparrowhawk I managed to spot in our garden yesterday, I thought it couldn't get much better than that. But this morning, as I got up, I looked out of my bedroom window to see a male sparrowhawk on the garden fence- it looked the same as the one I saw yesterday.

It didn't have anything in its talons and it seemed perfectly happy to sit on the fence- maybe it had just failed to catch something. Anyway, I took a few quick photos through my bedroom window, in case it flew away in the next 30 seconds or so. But, amazingly, it stayed sat on the fence for plenty of shots. After looking at them on the PC, only the one below was properly focused...

I do appreciate that Sparrowhawks have to eat as well which is why I don't usually mind seeing them in the garden (as long as they aren't too frequent).

That's all for now, have a great day :)

Chiffchaff on its way back?

After the last couple of days' cold weather, the birds were feeding frantically this morning. All the usual suspects were around, but a couple of interesting sightings too. One of these was a goldcrest, a bird which we do occasionally see on colder days. I wonder if it was the same bird we saw last year. I'd like to think it survived this years' harsh winter.I didn't manage a photo, as it was right at the end of the garden in the conifer tree.

The other bird I saw today was a chiffchaff- a garden first. It was flying around with the sparrows around the bird bath, so it was hard to spot at first. But it was much more active and more colourful than the sparrows so I looked through the binoculars, and realised it was a chiffchaff. I somehow managed to get my camera out and get a record shot through my bedroom window before it disappeared.

I'm guessing this bird was on its way back to Africa when it stopped by in our garden this morning. It wasn't there for long, but I'd like to think our garden bird bath and feeders will help that chiffchaff on its migration south!

We've had plenty of juvenile woodpigeons in the garden recently, like the one in the photo below:

I managed to clean out our camera nest box and re-adjust the camera today. Even though we had no nesting birds this year, a great tit pair began to build a nest, so there was a bit of moss on the nest box floor, and also some insects, so it was definitely worth cleaning it out. We had a great tit visit the box a week ago, so hopefully we will have a rooster this year.