Have you got a bully on your feeder? Now, we are not here to discuss birds and wildlife that bully others off their perch today, but more to talk about the favourite of my regular visitors – the bullfinch! The male can be easily spotted by a blue-grey back and bright rose-pink breast, belly and cheeks, whereas the female is more pinkish and brown. Whilst looking outside at the glorious weather of late I realised that I may love to look at them, and yet know very little about them in comparison to many other animals, wild or tame. Of course, known as wild birds in the UK they were once a popular cage bird too, probably before we began to bring parrots and other exotics. They would even imitate like parrots – perhaps a lot smarter than would be thought of this small red-bellied bird.  These stout birds are also...

What a week weather wise! I don’t know if you’ve had floods, freezing temperatures, driving wind & rain where you live, but we certainly have up here in Northumberland. The crops are soggy and battered whereas last year they were droughted off and suffering with extreme heat. We’re hoping that the weather will stabilise a little this week so we can make our haylage crop for Winter horse fodder for our Livery stables, but there again we hoped we could do that three weeks ago. The gardens are so green & the water baths for the birds most definitely have not needed filling, although the keeping the feeders filled has been a constant job. I’ve been watching soggy little sparrows just out of the nest lining up at our bird table (thankfully a covered one) being shown by the adult where the easiest grub is. The poor birds were struggling to...