Long-Tailed Tits

Not the huge flocks of them which some people get, and which have had in the past, but quite a few of them. They really go for our fat balls from the RSPB which have dried insect bits in them - okay so the idea of a lump of lard with bits of dead insect may not appeal to you or me but the birds love them! In addition we've had great and blue tits around on the feeders too, and the usual two grossly overweight pigeons which I think only survive the cat population because they're deemed to high-risk as prey because of their size because they've got a take-off run like a fully laden airliner...

The primroses and snowdrops are out in flower, I'm not sure if we planted or inherited these, or even if they're the actual wild ones, but they could be!

Birds and future building projects

Well we keep having lots of birds in the garden, nothing exotic but there is nothing wrong with blue tits, chaffinches and spadgers! The odd blackbird has been hopping around too which is always good. On the plant side of things, we have snowdrops and primroses, though the garden still lacks the early flowering things which would be so useful for insects like Bumble Bees and which I have so much trouble establishing. This is something on which I need to work NOW in time for next spring of course.

I've got a couple of building projects to do this year as well, a new bike shed and a reconstruct of the ricketty old tree house which I took down before it fell down. Both of them I think will offer the opportunity for added wildlife value by covering them with plants, and possibly including nest boxes in the construction

Birds

After a depressing year in which birds seemed almost absent from the garden there seem to be quite a few around at the moment. The months of wet weather last year seemed to have resulted in the birds not showing themselves and I was worried that the population had plummetted as the feeders were essentially just going mouldy where they hung. But at the moment both feeders are being visited again and over the past couple of days we've had chaffinches, great tits, and long tailed tits about. With any luck a drier year this year might get our numbers back up again..though it costs me more in wild bird food; my loss is the RSPB shop's gain of course! It would be nice if the bird boxes I put up last year are used this season

The pond is unfrozen but needs a good clean up, and plans to replant round the back of it must be a priority this year, as is the planting of more service station plants generally. No sign of Ash dieback in our hedge, which doesn't have a lot of Ash trees but there are a few mixed in with the other stuff. I'd like to get some holly in there somewhere, there are gaps...

Wasps

Found this lovely sleepy wasp in the garden this afternoon, yes I did say 'lovely' because I'm a great fan of wasps - not when they sting me of course, but then again they don't do that gratuitously. But generally, they're great pest controllers around the place and actually they're amazingly handsome. I remember a couple of years ago sitting in the tea room at Corfe Castle with Philip sharing his scones and jam with wasps ("I've got lots, I don't mind sharing") - he was entranced with them nipping to and from his plate. Now, they can be a pest and last year we had to have a nest dealt with for the first time; normally we just leave them be up in the eves but this one was in a place where they could have been nasty. But generally, I reckon we ought to learn to love wasps.

Bright and sunny

The warm weather has really kicked the garden into life, with stuff coming up all over. The new hedging plants have all come into bud so I've had 100% survival over the winter and with an entire growing season now they've got their roots down I'm hoping for some serious growth this year. The frog-spawn has hatched into tadpoles, though we do have an iminent hosepipe ban in prospect so we may be topping up the pond with buckets as filling domestic ponds is banned - though the water board do say they make an exception for filling fish ponds. I've emailed them, copied to our local wildlife trust, to see if that exemption extends to wildlife ponds in domestic gardens...and if not why not? With garden ponds being so vital for wildlife these days I would have thought there was a strong case for it.

I also saw the first bats airborne this week, which is always good :-)

Mad as a pond full of frogs..

And the pond has been FULL of frogs this weekend, we've been counting somewhere between 10 and 15 at any one time, all croaking away. There only seems to be one clump of frog spawn as yet, which makes us wonder if there are a lot of males and only one female in the pond. But everywhere you look there are frogs, on the weed, under the weed, swimming around...  In previous years we've been quite worried about the number of tadpoles which do not metamorphose properly into frogs, but clearly there must have been quite a number which did given how many have returned as adults. We also got a brief view of a newt in there today, probably trying to avoid being squished by amourous frogs I should think. We've had newts consistantly for a couple of years now, though the eggs are hard to spot and newt-poles very furtive, so we don't know if they're breeding. They're common newts, and none the worse for that, including a male who does look very handsome!

Kit also had a hornet sighting in the tree house today. I trust him to identify it correctly because he's seen a hornet before and is unlikely to confuse it with a queen wasp. I'm sorry I missed it because they're such spectactular insects, though I hope it was only foraging and not looking to nest because we don't really have anywhere which can take a hornet nest safely and I'd hate to have them exterminated as they're so amazing and still quite rare - though numbers are up now. Over in the water park my mate Will says they always 'lose' a few bat boxes every year to nesting hornets. So as long as they don't nest, they're welcome to forage here any time.

No sign of any of the birds taking an interest in the new nest boxes yet, but it's still early days for that. But there are loads of them hitting the feeders still so I'm hopeful that the blue tits will make use of them.

Bird Boxes

The first of the bird boxes are up, there are lots of blue tits around the garden so with any luck they'll get used. I've put up two so far but I'd like to put up some more before the spring if I can.There are also lots of birds busy feeding in the garden now, which is great because I was really worried that numbers had plummted from what they were, but now it's looking good again.

It's turned cold again, so the frog-bonkfest seems to have stopped: no frogspawn as yet.