Monday 20 May 2013

The weather today proved totally unproductive for any decent birding, rain, drizzle, low cloud and cool temperatures all conspired to make it a very quiet day. The only thing I can note was the finding of two drake MANDARIN DUCKS in the Wet Woods, where a MALLARD had a family of 18 ducklings! I wonder how many of those will escape predation ? Talking of which, I checked up on the BLACKBIRD nest in my garden boundary this morning, finding one dead chick below the nest, and the nest empty :-(  I wonder who did that!  Could have been the magpie, Jay or even the Sprawk.A sad end to all that work that the adult birds went through to get to within 5 days of fledging their young. All part of nature though, just think if no Blackbird nests were predated, next year the place would be over run with them, there would be no food for them all and disease would be rife, nature provides plenty to go round for all, and enough survivors to continue the species - as long as humans stay out of it!!

Back to the 'garden photo blog' folder to brighten todays post  :-)
GREAT SPOTTED WOODPECKER
Great Spotted Woodpecker
STARLING
Starling
Starling
MAGPIE - did he take the young Blackbirds ?
Who me ? No mate, it wasn't me!

5 comments:

Marc Heath said...

Cracking Great spot shots Warren, very clean images.

Warren Baker said...

Thanks Marc,
I get lots of practice with those woodies!

Alan Pavey said...

Still waiting for Mandarin here Mate, nice Woody again :-)

ShySongbird said...

Sorry to have missed your posts recently Warren (real life does have a nasty habit of getting in the way) but I've enjoyed catching up with them. A shame about the Blackbirds but as you say that is the natural order of things and only man puts it out of kilter. Of course the domestic cat is one if not the biggest cause of bird predation and I think we have the Romans to thank for their introduction...humans again!

Love all the photos especially the Song Thrush in the earlier post with beak stuffed full of worms :-) also the Moorhen and chick and of course all the flutters. On this post the first is my favourite :-)

Warren Baker said...

Hi Songbird,
Real life, oh, I thought blogging was real life LoL :-)

Thanks for the kind comments though, I missed them!