A couple of things returned to our back garden today. Unfortunately, one of them was the snow which was, of course, also in the front garden and all our neighbours’ gardens. Still, it is February and that’s often a bad month, never mind my getting a year older.
On a brighter note, hawk-eyed Carol was once again staring out of the window when a much more welcome visitor returned, this time to our nice new niger seed feeder. We’ve seen a small flock of Siskins in a few previous years but today was the first time that we’d spotted one this season. By some miracle, it stayed long enough for me to bring a camera to bear on it with the requisite tripod. Of course, I still desperately need a better lens. 🙂 Even more fortunately, this Siskin was cooperatively on the correct side of the feeder. The colourful character showing its back end on the opposite side of the feeder is that other niger-seed-loving individual, a Goldfinch. Both the Goldies and Siskins have very different feeding behaviour to the Tits and Chaffinches in that they tend to occupy a perch and stay there feeding. Most other smaller birds grab a beakful of food and fly away with it.
Just to bulk things out a bit, this wider shot shows quite an interesting grouping with the Goldfinch and Siskin in the company of a Great Spotted Woodpecker. The Woodpecker darn nearly frightened the Siskin away but fortunately it stood its ground.
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