Chaffinch visiting garden

Recently, chaffinches seem to be the most common visitor to our garden. There is almost always one on our feeders or sat in the tree. Its interesting how about 5/10 years ago, greenfinches were easily the most common finch species in the garden. Things appear to have changed somewhat. Although having said that, greenfinch numbers in the last year or so do seem to have recovered a bit.

Anyway, below is the selection of photos I took of a rather tame male chaffinch coming to feed a few days ago...

As you may have noticed, I have uploaded these photos in "extra large" size, mostly just to test what they would look like. I haven't decided whether I like it or not, could well be that I carry on uploading photos as I used to.

I'm continuing to update the 2011 archive of this blog with some of the photos I never got round to posting so feel free to check out my posting yesterday (before the Twitter one), showing the list of posts I have added. Anyway, have a great day :D

Joining Twitter

Just to let you all know that I have now made a Twitter account for anything related to my blog. You may have noticed the Twitter widget on the right of the screen, which shows all of my recent tweets. I have decided to create an account for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it will be really useful for giving people short updates on stuff that's going on here when I don't have enough time for doing full posts on stuff. So if I haven't done a post in a few days, there'll be a fairly chance I will have tweeted about something instead. Also I'll be able to let you know if I'm currently working on a post and when to expect it posted and stuff. And finally, it allows me to just share the odd thing that occurs, such as an observation or something, that isn't really long enough for it to be worth writing a full post about.

Anyway, as you've probably seen, my Twitter username is JoeWG2012 (the WG standing for wildlife garden). Follow me if you do have a Twitter account, and I'll follow you back :) I have no idea how many of you use Twitter so I don't know whether this will be a good idea or not. But anyway, I really recommend those of you who haven't got a Twitter account yet should jump aboard. Its free to join, and getting used to it doesn't take very long at all. Also its good to be able to follow naturalists such as Chris Packham, and conservation organisations such as the BTO. Honestly, its worth it! I've had a personal twitter account for ages now and I was really sceptical at first, but its one of those things where you'll only really understand what I mean when you try it yourself.

The screenshot below shows the layout of Twitter for those who haven't seen it before:

Anyway, hopefully some of you will at least notice the Twitter feed on the right of my blog even if you don't create an account yourself. Happy tweeting everyone! 

The 2011 catch up marathon

As you probably gathered from my last post, I have a lot of photos and video from last year still to post on this blog that I never got round to doing. What I have decided to do though since my last post is to post all the photos to the date they were actually taken. So basically, I will be filling in the gaps of last years archive so that everything will be posted on the date that it happened. All of the photos I have taken show the date they were taken, so it will not be a difficult task.

I realise though that you won't want to go trawling through my 2011 posts to look out for stuff that happened in some cases nearly a year ago. So I decided I will use this post to add links to the the posts I do. Obviously I appreciate that not many of you will want to check this out, but its there if you want it, and is useful for my own purposes as it will allow me to organise all the stuff I still need to post. This will be a gradual process so stick with me and I'll do my best to add the posts as quickly as I can. So here is the list...

• 25/02/2011 - Blue tit pair visits conservatory camera nest box  - turns out I had already posted this video, but I only realised after I had posted this. This post though has more info on the visit than the original and I also added it to the camera nest box diary for 2011
• 02/05/2011 - Male blackbird searching lawn for worms (photos)
• 03/05/2011 - Starling visits bird bath (photos)
• 19/06/2011 - Visit to college lake in summer (photos)

Thank you for checking this out, much appreciated :) Keep checking back every now and then if you like, as the chances are a new post will have been added. I do have a lot to post! Also expect to see camera nest box postings from last year appearing on the list too, I haven't forgotten about those :) Its just the fact that I have to use my old (about 6 years and very slow) laptop to record any camera nest box footage, so anything that gets recorded needs to be transferred to the laptop I use for everything else. The only reason I don't use my current laptop for recording is because the sound doesn't work on the capture software, despite my best efforts to try and sort it out.

Anyway, have a great day folks and enjoy this weather while it lasts :D