More November

The last couple of days have been dry, yesterday was lovely, clear blue sky and almost no wind, today is cloudy with a cool breeze. It is really looking like winter now as Ben and I go for our walks, there are very few leaves left on the hedges and the berries have almost all been eaten. There were a lot of holly berries a couple of weeks ago but I noticed there are very few left today. I put the first fat balls out in the garden today, it didn't take the birds long to start on them, under an hour in fact. The Gold finches have been in near the house on the dock seed heads, they only come to the bird food when I put out sun flower seeds and bird seed. I like to leave seed heads on things as long as possible so that there is a bit of variety for them to choose from. We seem to be a bit down on blackbird numbers at present but they may be out round the fields still. I hope to see them later in the year, we had five or six last winter. I have added two photos to the blog which I took last winter one of a rook which spent ages trying to get the fat balls off the hook. The second one is a young Sparrow Hawk which visited three days in a row and just sat on the stone trough under where the bird feeders were, it never came again after the third day.

November

During the winter I am going to include things of interest in both our garden and the immediate locality as there is less to see on the old bog road now.
It seems that the coming of November is a signal to all the birds that it is time to get into their winter flocks. There are large numbers of the finch family congregating now in the hedges as Ben and I go for our walks. The pigeons are also to be seen in the fields in quite large groups. The river Barrow in Athy has its usual flotilla of swans which always gather at this time of year, it has evidently been a good year for cygnets as there are quite a number of young ones among the flock. I haven't seen the buzzards lately but they are probably somewhere in the locality as they have been mewing round all this year. We have a good range of species of birds visiting the feeders again. they seem to feed at slightly different times of day, for instance great tits, coal tits and blue tits come mid morning, then around mid day we get sparrows, chaffinches and green finches in larger numbers. The robins like the bird table best as do the black birds. The pheasants are rather nervous at present as the shooting season has just begun but quite a number roost in the garden. the red squirrel paid a fleeting visit to the garden again last week which was lovely.